Larger text
Smaller text
Print
E-mail
GE report has a big gee-whiz factor
Retired business editor Jack Markowitz's columns are published on Sundays and Thursdays. He can be reached via e-mail.
Here is the country's biggest all-around manufacturer and everything else. Never was so much under one roof. Broadcaster, moviemaker, power plant builder, kitchen supplier, loan company -- can it all be managed?
The credo at Fairfield, Conn., headquarters is: yes or get out of here.
And also, that technical pioneering still has a home in American business, so often headlined nowadays for the sordid, the corner-cutting and self-serving. A report like GE's suggests why bright kids still dream of accomplishing something in industry.
How about, for instance, tapping the energy of locomotives that are slowing down? The big brakes are put on countless times a day all over the world with enough waste to power 150 homes. GE says it can harness that.
Faster, earlier diagnosis of breast cancer is another urgent mission. Also, the building of water desalination plants off many seacoasts -- and immense windmills. Thirty stories tall, with blades as long as football fields, they'll catch far more kilowatts than the chancy breezes of wind-farms on land. Environmentalists tend to forget how deeply imbedded energy saving is in the American way of making a dollar.
GE says its new locomotives -- 1,200 on order -- extract the pulling power of 16 old diesel cylinders from just 12. The waste energy from braking a locomotive can be captured in batteries, adding 2,000 horsepower while saving 5 percent on fuel, 10 percent on emissions.
In health care, GE says its "LightSpeed VCT scanner" can tell doctors a lot about the heart in five beats, diagnose chest pain "in a breathhold." A new generation of small jet engines might bring four-to-eight-passenger planes to thousands of small airports not served by major airlines -- including some crossed-off by US Airways, let's hope.
By the end of this decade, GE sees $1 billion in power plant sales for its coal-cleaning process. And by the end of the next decade, 2020, some 500 million "active consumers" in China for credit cards, auto loans, mortgages, 16 million annual car sales, and a $5 trillion gross domestic product. (But China as a geopolitical rival? No comment.)
Company Chairman Jeffrey R. Immelt, hand-picked successor to the charismatic (but foolishly self-sullied) Jack Welch, says in his shareholder letter that GE has "played hurt" the past few years. It grew only at a middling pace to 2004's $16.6 billion net profits on $152 billion sales. Not enough. Never increase profits 50 percent in just a half-decade that way. Growing every business at least 10 percent a year is an absolute goal. Immelt says he's determined to disprove the mere "numerologists" who say that a company like GE "is too big to grow." Hey, let's see.
More Columnist Jack Markowitz headlines
- Only low taxes can save dying big cities
- Paul's good health care idea won't ever survive
- Criticism of bankers off base
- Investors often run from jaws of the abyss
- Inflation written all over 'wall of worry'
- Maybe women CEOs could have thwarted the meltdown
- Up next for rescue is retirees' trust fund
- Turning a page on Carnegie
