Making GE an “industrial company first” and pushing our competitive advantage in technology — they’re key themes at GE in 2010 and ones that take center stage in a new letter to shareholders in this year’s Annual Report. “In 2010, we will spend about 5 percent of our industrial revenue on R&D,” writes GE’s Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt in the note. “We have filed 20,000 patents this decade. We have nearly 40,000 engineers and scientists around the world. We have developed more than 150 core technologies that create leadership across our company. We share technologies and innovation across multiple platforms to create technological scale. We benchmark each of these against our competition and lead in many.” One of the most recent examples of that technology push can be seen in the handheld Vscan ultrasound. As GE Healthcare’s Al Lojewski explains in the video below, which is part of GE’s online Annual Report: “We really hope that this is going to truly change the way that all physicians worldwide interact with their patients.”
December 15, 2009
GE’s near-term financial outlook is solid and the company is positioned for solid earnings and cash flow growth in the future, GE chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt told some 200 securities analysts, investors and members of the media today at the company’s annual outlook meeting in New York. “GE is ending 2009 back on offense,” Jeff said. “The worst is behind us in financial services and GE Capital will be a meaningful contributor to the company. GE has defined the businesses that fully utilize the GE competitive advantage and this is where we will invest and grow. GE will generate significant available cash and be extremely thoughtful about creating long-term shareholder value as we deploy capital.”
December 9, 2009
Today GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt spoke at the United States Military Academy at West Point, focusing on the need for leaders who have the courage to change themselves and others if the country is to realize a better economic future after the seismic changes of the last year. And it’s precisely West Point’s values of “Duty, Honor, and Country” and its commitment to integrity, performance and change that “every person in the United States — from business and from government — can learn from,” he said.
October 20, 2009
GE’s drive to miniaturize technologies in order to make them more mobile couldn’t be better illustrated than with the breakthrough Vscan technology that GE’s Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt unveiled during his talk tonight at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Roughly the size of a smart phone, it houses powerful ultrasound technology that can potentially redefine the way doctors examine patients. By giving doctors a view into the body from the palm of a hand, GE believes that Vscan could one day become as indispensable as the traditional physician’s stethoscope in patient exams.
October 20, 2009
During his speech tonight at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt is unveiling a potentially game-changing computerized system that will give real-time clinical data and treatment options to doctors — right at a patient’s side. Developed using three decades of clinical information from the Intermountain Healthcare system of hospitals, it provides doctors faster access to current research. In the audio clip below, Dr. Graham Hughes, who is Chief Medical Officer & Vice President of Product Strategy for GE Healthcare’s Enterprise IT Solutions division, provides a walkthrough of what doctors would see. Click on the full screen button at the bottom right of the player to enlarge it.
