BOSTON (Bloomberg) — General Electric Co. will record a first-quarter expense of $115 million, or about 1 cent a share, after it lost an appeal against nine insurers in New York state over payments for thousands of asbestos-related claims.The cost won’t change the Fairfield, Connecticut-based company’s first-quarter profit forecast of 43 cents to 45 cents a share, spokesman Gary Sheffer said.

The New York State appeals court in Albany rejected on February 15 efforts by GE to group into a single claim all the people exposed to asbestos in steam turbines from 1966 to 1986. GE, the world’s biggest maker of power-plant equipment, didn’t manufacture the asbestos.

“We are disappointed in the decision, which is contrary to how the majority of courts have ruled,” Sheffer said. “We are reviewing our options.”

As of 2002, more than 400,000 claims were filed against GE, with each judgement averaging $1,500, according to the ruling.

Since that year, GE has closed most cases against it, Sheffer said. The company currently has 40,000 cases pending compared with 70,000 in 2002, and 80 percent of the people involved aren’t sick. Of the cases settled last year, 90 percent didn’t require payment, GE said.

The court ruled that GE, through its affiliate the now- defunct Electric Mutual Liability Insurance Co., was self-insured with a cap of $5 million per injury, with some exceptions. It denied GE’s bid to treat all the injuries as one occurrence so it could tap up to $2 billion in secondary insurance, according to the Wall Street Journal, which reported the story earlier.