NEW YORK - General Electric said Monday it would cut an additional 10,000 jobs from its aviation sector as the coronavirus pandemic decimates the industry, forcing companies to cancel orders.
The cuts will be a mix of voluntary departures and layoffs and come after an initial wave of 2,600 job cuts in March, GE said in a statement.
The company aims to reduce its aviation employment base by 25 percent, or some 13,000 employees.
The austerity program, which will affect all geographic zones, is reflective of the rough time the entire aviation sector is going through.
Boeing announced last week that it was cutting 16,000 jobs, about 10 percent of its workforce, in civilian aircraft manufacturing.
It also heavily reduced production of its long-haul 787 and 777/777X planes. The company has yet to announce a date when it will resume assembly of its flagship 737 MAX aircraft. Airbus has similarly reduced production.
GE is directly affected by these decisions, as it makes plane engines for Boeing and Airbus.
Global air traffic is expected to fall 80 percent during the second quarter compared to February, GE said in a letter to 52,000 employees.
"To protect our business, we have responded with difficult cost-cutting actions over the last two months," CEO David Joyce said in the letter.
"Unfortunately, more is required as we scale the business to the realities of our commercial market."
The job cuts are part of a $3 billion savings plan that will be implemented this year.
In addition, half of the employees in charge of aviation maintenance and repairs are out of work for 3 months.
Hiring has also been frozen and bonuses canceled.
GE, which makes aircraft engines in a joint venture with the French company Safran, CFM, saw revenue fall by 8 percent to $20.52 billion in the first quarter.
The aviation division's revenue plunged 13 percent to $6.9 billion, while its orders were down 14 percent.
The group, which warned at the end of April that the worst was yet to come, has not sought the financial aid that US President Donald Trump has promised to companies in order to protect jobs.
Agence France-Presse
NEW YORK -- Jack Welch, an iconic American businessman who built General Electric into one of the world's industrial flagships, died on Monday aged 84, the company said.
Dubbed the "manager of the century," by Fortune magazine in 1999, Welch transformed GE into a sprawling conglomerate during his 2 decades as chief executive, and was considered one of the most influential men in the global business community.
"Today is a sad day for the entire GE family. Jack was larger than life and the heart of GE for half a century. He reshaped the face of our company and the business world," GE chief executive Larry Culp said in an email confirming Welch's death.
Welch, the son of a train driver, expanded GE beyond household appliances, healthcare and aeronautics into finance with GE Capital and media with NBCUniversal.
The company's market capitalization grew from $12 billion when he took over in 1981 to $410 billion when he left.
"There was no corporate leader like 'neutron' Jack," President Donald Trump tweeted, referring to a nickname Welch earned for his ruthless job cuts.
The entrepreneur didn't mind the reputation: in his memoir, he said GE's workforce shrank from 411,000 to 299,000 in his first 5 years as CEO.
"He was my friend and supporter. We made wonderful deals together. He will never be forgotten," the president said of Welch, an ardent supporter of the Republican party.
Born in Massachusetts, Welch received a doctorate in 1960 and joined GE the same year as a chemical engineer in its plastics division, rising through the ranks to become vice chairman in 1979, then CEO two years later.
However his reign in bitter failure, when European regulators denied GE's merger attempt with Honeywell, another US industrial conglomerate.
Welch left GE in 2001, handing his successor Jeff Immelt a company in good health, a few days before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 by Al-Qaeda.
Immelt's reign was marked by 9/11, the bursting of the Internet bubble and the global financial crisis, forcing him to sell off NBCUniversal to cable operator Comcast, while GE Capital, caught up in subprime mortgage crisis, had to liquidate one asset after another.
The company is now fighting for its survival, having been ejected from the Wall Street benchmark Dow Jones Industrial Average, with a value of only $95 billion under current CEO Larry Culp.
Agence France-Presse
PARIS - Investors in General Electric, once one of the world's most valuable companies, lost tens of billions of dollars after the Paris climate deal as it failed to adapt to the pace of the green energy transition, new analysis showed Thursday.
A report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) said GE had lost a "simply staggering" $193 billion (172 billion euros) in just three years to 2018 -- amounting to almost three quarters of its market capitalization.
The Cleveland-based research group said GE and its principal shareholders misjudged the falling price of renewables as the world transitions to cleaner energy and suffered from a collapse of the gas turbine and thermal power construction markets.
"GE assumed wrongly that demand for natural gas and coal would continue to track global economic growth," they said, accusing GE of "an epic failure of corporate governance."
The 2015 Paris accord enjoins nations to work towards limiting global temperature rises to "well below" two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) and to a harder cap of 1.5C if possible.
To do so, governments must commit to curbing greenhouse gas emissions -- the leading source of which is burning fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal for power.
As the price of renewable energy technologies such as wind and solar fell in recent years, the IEEFA said GE has been left with billions in stranded fossil fuel-related assets as cheaper alternatives curbed industry demand for coal and gas.
The company also failed to account for increasing energy efficiency, driven largely by renewables, which decoupled energy demand from global economic activity, according to the report.
In particular, GE's power division, which in 2016 equated to half of the company's pre-tax profit, continued to invest in gas turbine units even as global demand fell, the report said.
"The world is transitioning away from fossil fuels -- particularly expensive imported thermal coal and gas -- into low-cost, zero-pollution domestic renewables such as wind and solar," said Tom Sanzillo, IEEFA's director of finance.
"This is where the smart money is, but GE failed to pick the trend."
A global divestment movement is underway calling on pension and hedge funds, among others, to end investment in upstream fossil fuel projects. Hundreds of institutions in control of over $6 trillion in assets have joined the initiative.
When contacted by AFP, a spokeswoman referred to comments made by CEO Larry Culp to an energy conference last month, when he acknowledged there was "a lot of self-help required" to manage the company's assets.
"Some people would suggest that the gas business is dying (and) there are certainly structural challenges afoot," Culp said.
"We just don't think gas is going to zero in the near to medium term, right? So it really puts the onus on us to continue to innovate, continue to serve."
source: news.abs-cbn.com
After spending two years on the sidelines, Google Glass internet-linked eyewear is back in the game, this time aimed at helping workers do their jobs.
General Electric, Volkswagen, and Boeing are among more than 50 businesses taking part in testing a Glass Enterprise Edition in a limited program, project lead Jay Kothari said Tuesday in a blog post.
Three years ago, an Explorer program let developers and other "early adopters" try out the glasses, in an early test of potential business applications. But that initiative was eventually put on ice in 2015.
"Workers in many fields, like manufacturing, logistics, field services and health care find it useful to consult a wearable device for information and other resources while their hands are busy," Kothari said.
The team at Glass, which is back to being part of the X lab innovative new technologies unit at Google-parent Alphabet, has spent the past two years customizing the eyewear for workers.
Feedback from businesses taking part in the program has prompted a decision to make Glass Enterprise Edition available to more companies, according to Kothari.
Financial details of the program were not disclosed.
After the Explorer program ended, corporate restructuring put the division devoted to "moonshots" such as internet-linked eyewear and self-driving cars under corporate parent Alphabet.
Glass -- hotly anticipated by some, mocked by others -- became available in the United States in early 2014 to anyone with $1,500 to spare and a desire to become an "explorer."
The Glass test, or beta, program was later expanded to Britain.
Glass connected to the Internet using Wi-Fi hot spots or, more typically, by being wirelessly tethered to mobile phones. Pictures or video could be shared through the Google+ social network.
Google faced a challenge to burnish the image of the consumer version of Glass, which triggered concerns about privacy since the devices are capable of capturing pictures and video.
A mixed reality market has since begun to blossom.
HTC, Sony and Facebook-owned Oculus compete with virtual reality gear, and Microsoft has unveiled HoloLens augmented reality visors that hold promise for workplace applications.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
