GE Healthcare to move X-ray team to China
Bloomberg
GE Healthcare employees in Beijing assemble medical magnetic resonance imaging devices Friday. General Electric will move the headquarters for its X-ray business to China from Waukesha to tap emerging market growth.
e-mail print By Rick Barrett of the Journal Sentinel
July 25, 2011 |(188) Comments
To better tap emerging markets, GE Healthcare is moving its X-ray equipment headquarters from Waukesha to Beijing.
The move will include the X-ray unit's top executives, the company said Monday, but otherwise will not affect the 150 or so people it employs in the Milwaukee area, including production employees.
There won't be job cuts, Anne LeGrand, vice president and general manager of X-ray for GE Healthcare, said at a Beijing news conference.
LeGrand will move to Beijing, along with a "handful" of other key executives, the company said.
The move will help "make the business more nimble and responsive while continuing to strengthen our local focus and grow our global footprint," LeGrand said.
GE Healthcare is a unit of General Electric Co., based in Fairfield, Conn.
The X-ray unit has been based in the Milwaukee area since 1947 and will become the first GE business headquartered in China. The unit plans to hire more than 65 engineers and support staff at a new facility in Chengdu.
Earlier this year, GE Healthcare launched a three-year initiative called "Spring Wind" that focuses on developing health care products, improving the medical distribution network across urban and rural China, and offering training for Chinese health care professionals.
GE Healthcare, also the world's biggest maker of MRI and CT scanners, got about $1.1 billion of its $16.9 billion in sales from China last year. More than 20% of the X-ray unit's new products will be developed in China, LeGrand said.
"We anticipate it's going to be a growing modality," she said, adding that her division should see "double-digit" growth as China converts from film and analog to digital X-ray technology.
Over the next five years, China will be GE Healthcare's most important growth market, Rachel Duan, the China unit's president and chief executive officer, said in Beijing.
The company wants to keep its leading position in providing medical devices targeted at higher-end Chinese customers, and also break into China's growing market for primary health care, a key goal of the Chinese government's health care reform plans.
To do this, GE Healthcare plans to boost China-based research, enabling it to introduce at least 20 products for the local market over the next three years, Duan said. Of those products, 70% will be used in primary care, such as by a general practitioner or family doctor. The company aims to double production capacity in China in five years, she said.
GE also makes X-ray equipment in the United States, India, Brazil, Mexico, France, Hungary and Finland. The X-ray unit employs 820 people worldwide.
Moving the unit's headquarters to Beijing won't change the manufacturing, GE spokesman Benjamin Fox said.
"It's only going to impact where our top executives are and how they, frankly, approach high-growth markets," Fox said.
About 60,000 people work at GE Healthcare globally, with more than 5,000 in China, including about 2,000 sales representatives.
A small but growing number of companies have moved senior executives to China, including Bayer Healthcare, which moved its general medicine headquarters from Germany to Beijing in March.
It's not surprising, given the growth in China and elsewhere in Asia, said Miao Grace Wang, a Marquette University economics professor.
Some products GE's X-ray unit developed in China are now sold elsewhere, such as the Ling Long digital machine sold in Africa, the Mideast and Latin America.
Bloomberg Business News contributed to this report from Beijing.
