General Electric powering for the road ahead

Editor's Note: The global financial crisis may have reinforced General Electric's (GE) CEO Jeffrey Immelt's strategy to create an overall corporate focus on global infrastructure needs. The third quarter profit of the US-based technology and services conglomerate plunged 22 percent, driven down by a 38 percent drop in earnings from financial services.

Immelt wants to restructure GE in a way that its industrial businesses account for 60 percent of its earnings by the end of 2009 and to reduce its reliance on financial services, which currently contribute about half of its profit.

Emerging markets like China are expected to be an important pillar for that strategy, due to their massive need for infrastructure. GE is expected to harvest $5 billion of revenues in China for this year and its target is to double that to $10 billion a year by 2010.