One small reason for hope: Immelt’s claim -“we have returned many GE appliance manufacturing jobs to the States” - IT’S TRUE !
In his WaPo Op-Ed new Obama economic jobs and recovery leader, GE’s Jeffrey Immelt claimed we have returned many GE appliance manufacturing jobs to the States by collaborating with our unions and making our operations more efficient.”
This sounded hard to believe so with a little research here is what I found..
MAY 2008
Good-bye to GE Appliances
Posted by: Diane Brady on May 14, 2008
Ask many Americans what they associate with General Electric and they’ll give you two words: light bulbs and ovens. Ask investors what they would like to see GE dropkick from its family and you’ll often hear the same words.
Now a piece in The Wall Street Journal says GE is about to put its appliances business on the auction block. While GE won’t comment on the report, offloading the unit makes a lot of sense. It could bring up to $8 billion into GE’s coffers and get rid of a business that no longer fits GE’s mission. GE may decide to spin off the business or get into a partnership, too.
Pundits will likely attribute the timing of this move to GE’s startling earnings miss last quarter. On April 12, GE announced a 6% drop in first-quarter earnings, related to the credit crunch, and CEO Jeff Immelt cut the company’s profit outlook for the year. The stock plunged 13%, amid a spate of analyst downgrades. The stock price issue has dogged Immelt, who took over for Jack Welch in September 2001 with the stock trading around $40 a share; it’s now hovering above $32.
Immelt has to do something to show he’s steering the $173 billion company in a better direction. And the $7 billion appliances business has been a sore point with Immelt for some time.
2009:
A new lease on life for GE’s Appliance Park
GE Consumer & Industrial confirmed earlier media reports that it will manufacture energy efficient hybrid electric water heaters in Louisville, KY, at its Appliance Park manufacturing campus. The new production line will create about 400 jobs.
OCT 2010
Oct. 18 (Bloomberg) — General Electric Co. plans to spend $432 million and add 500 U.S. jobs to design and make energy- efficient refrigerators, returning positions to a division up for sale as recently as 2008.
Factories and design centers in Bloomington, Indiana; Louisville, Kentucky; Decatur, Alabama; and Selmer, Tennessee, will open during the next four years, Fairfield, Connecticut- based GE said. Designs will incorporate Energy Star standards in effect in 2014 and target the U.S.
GE has invested more than $1 billion in its appliance unit, creating more than 1,300 jobs since 2009. Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt said in a September speech that he planned to bring appliance jobs back from China and Mexico, because U.S. workers were making higher-quality products for less. Employees and unions agreed to cut expenses, including reducing starting wages for production employees.
“This is a big commitment on the part of GE to transform the business and put us in a much different place,” Jim Campbell, head of the appliances and lighting division, said today in an interview with reporters.
The company decided to invest at a time when the industry is suffering so that GE will be ready with new products when business picks up, Campbell said. The industry expects to sell about 38 million units in the U.S. this year, down from about 50 million in 2006 during the housing boom, he said.
Dec 2010
After Cutting Losses, GE Refocuses On Manufacturing
The New York Times published a profile of Jeffrey Immelt, GE’s CEO, last Sunday titled “G.E. Goes With What It Knows: Making Stuff,” lauding his singular efforts to bring the company back from focusing on its financial divisions, instead putting the emphasis on – gasp! – actually making and building things.
Yep, you know that when one of the “bluest of blue-chip” companies has to get out the media megaphone to announce its “come to Jesus” moment – realizing that manufacturing, the cornerstone of the past that the company was built on is now the wave of the future – something is changing in the air.
Indeed, Steve Lohr, the Times’ veteran business reporter, invokes the term (as well as the feeling of) “change” in the profile almost as many times as there are numbers of GE products – “drive change,” “drive growth and change,” “efforts to push large-scale change” – but, alas, as the saying goes: the more things change, the more they stay the same. The issue here isn’t change at all. A return to manufacturing simply seems imminent, so going back to an old classic shouldn’t feel any different at all.
But, after a decade or more of so many companies getting on the financial services bandwagon, it seemed natural for builders and makers like those at GE to get caught up in the financial world.
“The big buildup of GE Capital occurred during the tenure of Mr. Immelt’s famous predecessor, Jack Welch,” Lohr writes. “But while Mr. Immelt, who took over in 2001, spun off the unit’s insurance business, he also bulked up on commercial real estate and other loans. In 2004, G.E. even bought a subprime lender in California, WMC Mortgage, which it shed in 2007 for a $1 billion loss.”
We’ve long known that many companies in the metals sphere realize building things is the key to future economic stability – look no further than Nucor, whose progressive and extremely effective corporate culture needs no significant overhaul.
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