Posted on 07/26/2011 1:16:15 PM PDT by kcvl
General Electric Co.’s health care unit, the world’s biggest maker of medical imaging machines, is moving the headquarters of its 115-year-old X-ray business to Beijing.
Tweet 14 people Tweeted this.ShareThis .“A handful’’ of top managers will move to the Chinese capital and there won’t be any job cuts, said Anne LeGrand, general manager of X-ray for GE Healthcare. The headquarters will move from Wisconsin amid a broader plan to invest about $2 billion across China, including opening six “customer innovation’’ and development centers.
The division should have “double-digit’’ growth rates as the country converts from film and analog to digital X-ray technology, LeGrand said.
GE Healthcare, also the world’s biggest maker of magnetic resonance imaging and cardiac tomography scanners, got about $1.1 billion of its $16.9 billion in sales from China last year.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
F.O.O.
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This Drugstore.com coupon expires July 31, 2011.
$10 off $80 & Free Shipping Coupon
Good soundbite/campaigne poster material here.
Once the engineers are trained, this product will join all the other stuff in cargo holds coming from China.
GE = Obama’s best friend. I wonder if I could get some of those great GE grants and subsidies!
It doesn't make sensę to even bother trying in the USA... The government has now stacked the cards against us.
Name a city where a company has built a new manufacturing facility? Pretty hard to do. Factories are buildings that get torn down in urban America these days. New ones are not built and are not ever going to be built again.
Exorbitant property taxes, unions, regulation, environmental tyranny and urban ghettoization make US cities hostile environments for business investing.
Look at, say, Hartford, CT.
The "mill rate" is over 60 mills.
That means, for me to build a $10 million factory I would be liable for some approximately $500,000.00 in properry taxes alone per year. You have to stay up pretty late at night to figure out a way to hand over a half million bucks to some local tax collector...
Nobody in their right mind will invest in manufacturing in the average US urban ghetto.
“Or why are countries like China and Ireland attracting US corporations to set up their headquarters in those countries?”
Don’t know about the Irish, but the Chinese will steal the technology and kick GE to the curb once they do. GE is a fool.
I agree. Just don’t lecture me about J O B S when your jobs czar is moving jobs overseas because of your damn policies.
******
GE’s Immelt: Stop Complaining About Government
July 12, 2011
Immelt to jobs summit: Businesses need to do more – Jul. 11, 2011.
“The people who are part of the business sector, the people in this room, have got to stop complaining about government and get some action underway,” he told the group. “There’s no excuse today for lack of leadership. The truth is we all need to be part of the solution.”
Immelt is the chair of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. He said the group has made a number of recommendations for changes in government policies that should be able to help job creation, such as the executive order announced Monday asking independent agencies to rid their books of old and outdated regulations.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/07/11/news/economy/immelt_chamber_jobs_summit/index.htm?iid=HP_Highlight
Sure, lots of them! The problem is not just starting up, but growing. Regulatory shackles and confiscatory taxation make it hard to keep a business running on any size bigger than a handful of employees.
Surely we have enough know how to start up honest companies. It can't cost that much to make this stuff.
It's all really cheap - it's why you can get overseas produced versions for cheap. In the US, however, you'll need to probably get FDA certification (making medical products), and the liability insurance you'll have to carry - in case someone ingests your bandage, or puts the Aquafore on their cereal and gets sick - will be stratospheric.
Businesses typically do not move overseas because of labor or basic materials costs; by the time you factor in duties (yes, most things imported to the US have duties applied), shipping, and typically higher reject rates at the factory, the cost will be equal or greater.
However, that company will get to keep significantly more mof what it makes (the US has the highest corporate tax rate in the world, and a full 10% above the OECD average), much lower regulatory burden (no need to provide segregated bathrooms for transgender folks, ADA-compliant magazine holders, etc), and common-sense legal protections (when that client swallows the bandage the court will probably laugh them out of the room, rather than take the complaint seriously).
The overall cost of doing business outside the COGS is much lower. And that is 100% in control of the US Federal Government, and is something out Federal Government continues to ignore. So businesses keep moving.
Better to earn a few bucks overseas, than nothing at home, eh?
Sanctimonious hypocrite!
The lapdog media will give him a pass... After all, it’s “Team Obama” in action and the One must not be criticized.
If it’s a product for sale on the open market, you can bet that it’s already been acquired, torn apart, and reverse engineered not just by the Chinese, but in India, Russia, South Korea, Japan, and most of GE’s competitors.
Protecting IP of sold hardware/physical products is essentially impossible - you make the actual IP available for purchase by your competitors. And unless you have the IP protected in their country, don’t expect protection there.
I hold a few patents in the US, and some that were filed and granted in the US, Germany, and China. The only ones I’ve been able to successfully defend in Germany and China were those that were filed there. Unsurprisingly, most nations - including the US - ignore IP protection for other countries.
The US doesn’t care that you, a Taiwanese company, have a Taiwan patent on your product; we only care if you have a US patent as well. Well, most of the rest of the world does the same - they only care if you have a patent in their country, not in yours.
I'm in business to make money. Period.
This is not good.
I've been a lurker here at FR long enough to know that if you take that attitude, and also include a willingness to make money overseas, you'll be branded a traitor.
IMHO, paying your own way - even if earning it overseas - is vastly superior to taking Government handouts. And if we had sane regulations and taxation (I'd like to see the corporate income tax rate set to zero, personally - imagine the flood of repatriated capital and new businesses to US shores!) we'd see a lot more economic activity here.
Increasingly, the dwindling number of US businesses are surviving in spite of, not because of, the Government.
Precisely! GE doesn't like paying 39.6% of its gross income back to the Federal Government. I can't say I don't blame them...
Neither do the rest of us but someone has to pay taxes to keep Uncle Sugar happy. /s
It’s just ironic that Immelt is lecturing everyone else while GE pays NO damn taxes.
A low corporate tax rate alone would not be enough.
Local property taxes are exorbitant, regulation, unions and now environmental hurdles continually raise the height of barriers to business in the USA.
Then you have social regulation regarding protected ethnicities, genders and sexual preferences and a hostile legal environment with lawsuit-happy lawyers populating every icy sidewalk...
There is a lot wrong from a business perspective.
I have been to China. The corporations have moved top of the line production equipment to China and the workforce is just as capable and educated as Americans. It is very difficult to compete with that.
As a smart guy whose name I’ve forgotten said on CNBC last year:
China has central planning by scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, and the US has central planning by lawyers.
By definition we lose.
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