[Business Today]

Published date: 31st Oct 2010

Jeff Immelt stepped into Jack Welch’s shoes four days before 9/11. Even more than the legendary Welch, he has GE blood in his veins – his father worked for the company and he met his wife at the company. The 28-year-old GE veteran stands six feet four and has a firm grip, as befits an offensive tackle on the Dartmouth football team. Does he have an equally firm hold on GE’s way forward in India?

Five years ago, when we ran Immelt on our cover, the company talked of hitting $5 billion in India by 2010. They have not got there nearly by half. Now the maker of everything. from medical scanners to aircraft engines and nuclear power plants, has got emerging-markets religion. “In five years from now. India should be $10 billion or more, and five to 10 per cent of GE,” Immelt told Business Today in a candid interview with no questions off the record (click on www.businesstoday.in/immelt). Can the company’s “imagination at work” motto work in chaotically growing India?

The answer is, it has little choice but to bet on India. Demographics and market size dictate the bet, but the ride will not be easy, as India’s nuclear liability law makes clear. For Immelt, who has seen GE stock decline from $39.66 on the day he took the helm in 2001 to $17.05 on October 7, it was also clear that India needed a different formula, and that is what Executive Editor Josey Puliyenthuruthel decodes from page 52. But does India have the “grrr factor” – a mixture of ambition, energy, and passion-that, Welch says, is one of the important ingredients that will lure investment decisions? “Indeed. India’s only local market advantage could be that it is easier to enter and survive in because, well, it is just so much less competitive than China.” Welch wrote in 2007, “The downside of India’s form of coalition democracy, of course, is a bureaucracy that moves slowly as in cold molasses.”

Immelt is shucking Welch’s shoes on this one. GE India now has a CEO, John Flannery, with a “whatever works” mandate. Whether it is locomotives, or jet engines, or reactors, India badly needs powering, and the world’s 13th-largest company will use this country as a test-bed for other emerging economies. We can be optimistic.

Some of that hope comes not just from the world’s giant companies, but from even the smallest Indian start-ups that are looking to make a giant leap into global markets. Globalisation is a must, as a McKinsey column on page 83 spells out. Our team of writers uncovered a bouquet of fascinating examples in the fourth and final instalment of the Gen Next series. And the men and women we profile could well be part of management folklore one day. Whether it is creating intellectual property in animation, or exporting roses to the pernickety Japanese – I know exactly how tough that export market is for perishables, having witnessed at first hand in the 1990s dogged battles by New Zealand to ship its apples or by the United States to ship its beef these entrepreneurs deserve our admiration.

Talking about fuss-budget buyers, do not forget to look through our photo essay starting on page 84 on a Ludhiana family that combines management learning with rolled-up sleeves to export high-grade honey to Europe and the United States. Those bee-keepers have hit a sweet spot. Cold molasses, indeed.