 Power of four helps GE's China expansion
Updated: 2008-08-26 07:52 A year ago, GE announced the formation of GE Enterprise Solutions, a new business created as part of GE Industrial including the group's Sensing & Inspection Technologies, GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms, Security and Digital Energy, to help GE's global customers elevate productivity through superior technology and solutions. Charlene Begley has been named president and CEO of the business. She appointed, Albert Wong, a Chinese man as the first general manager of GE Enterprise Solutions China Region to make the mainland market a specific focus for development. Begley sat down with China Daily's reporter Wang Zhenghua in Shanghai, and shared her strategy of doing business in China. Q: Why does GE put the four businesses under GE Enterprise Solutions? A: The reason we integrate the four businesses is to give them focus. These businesses have a lot of technology and huge growth potential. So our chairman wants someone from his staff to focus 100 percent on them to really accelerate growth. The reason we formally put them together was to help facilitate connecting technologies. We link our technologies from our intelligent platform businesses with technology from our digital energy businesses, with our sensing technologies from our sensing and inspection businesses. We can offer a broader value proposition of customers. Q: How about your performance in China and why did you name a Chinese man as the leader of GE Enterprise Solutions China? A: We are growing very nicely in China and we are extremely optimistic that growth can only accelerate in the future. With a Chinese CEO, we can make sure that we continue to have the right level of resources, to do local research development, local engineering, local manufacturing and local customer support. Q: How do you integrate the four businesses? A: The integration we are most excited about is when we link the technologies together to bring new solutions to customers. For example, in the water industry, GE has a lot of domain expertise in water as we are a large player in water industry. So our technologists will work with the GE Water business to understand the opportunities to help their customers to do better. Our engineers will sit down with their customer service people and go to the field and watch what they are doing. By doing that, we identify opportunities to help improve their processes and elevate productivity. Q: What are the benefits of integration of the four businesses? A: We do run the four businesses as four businesses. For example, Digital Energy is mostly focused on power quality, power reliability and uninterrupted power and Sensing & Inspection Technologies is focused on sensor, non-destructive testing and inspection technologies. We have a dedicated focus team to grow those four businesses. But we have Wong to oversee all of them so that we can leverage the commonalities. We have big customers like Baosteel. Wong will coordinate to bring in enterprise solution that is broader than one business may do on its own. In addition we will have common human resources, when we do staffing we will work on it as one team for proficiency purposes. We have common finance processes and legal processes. So we can get more productivity on more support functions. But we are still focused business by business, product by product to optimize and accelerate growth individually. Q: What is the biggest challenge of doing business in China? A: Our biggest challenge is hiring people fast enough. It's a competitive market and getting talent is a competitive issue. Also we must make sure these people want to stay with GE. GE is very well-known for management development. We give them great training so a lot of companies want to steal them because they know we train them very well. We always recruit technologists and engineers of mechanical, electronic, control, software and material. We need everything from manufacturing leadership talent to human resources, to IT talent. So a broader array of talent is required to run our business. Q: What kind of business might become your target of acquisition? A: We think of acquisitions in three ways. I will look at companies that help accelerate our technology, companies that help complete the vertical solutions we try to offer to customers and companies that will increase our footprint in the third part of the world where we are small and would like to grow. We are always looking. 
 (China Daily 08/26/2008 page15) |
