General Electric Co. is spinning off its finance unit and returning $90 billion to shareholders as it seeks to become a more focused industrial business.

The new restructuring plan would include buying back up to $50 billion of its shares and selling $30 billion in real estate assets over two years, as well as divesting more GE Capital operations, according to a Reuters report.

Shares of GE jumped 8.5 percent on the news.

The move will be funded by $35 billion through cash returned from GE Capital. The repurchase will be the second-biggest in history, only behind a $90 billion plan by Apple. GE plans to reduce its total outstanding shares from 10.06 billion to 8-8.5 billion by 2018.

GE will shed a total of $275 billion in GE Capital assets in the move, including its Synchrony Financial credit card unit, real estate transactions, and future sales of commercial landing and consumer banking.

A total of $90 billion in finance assets will be kept within GE, which are directly related to selling products like jet engines and power generation equipment.

This move will help greatly increase profitability by 2018, GE officials said in a conference call with analysts. While GE Capital will see its earnings drop by 25 cents per share, the stock buybacks should help offset that, they said.

Blackstone Group LP and Wells Fargo & Co. announced that they will buy most of the GE Capital Real Estate assets for $23 billion.

GE Chief Executive Officer Jeff Immelt told investors that the company is trying to generate 90 percent of its profits from industrial operations within the next few years.

Analysts agreed that the move away from finance was a surprising one, but they appeared to view the announcement as a big positive for the company going forward.

Since GE is considered a systemically important financial institution, the move will make it subject to government regulation, but GE said it would apply to avoid that oversight in 2016.