The Annual Report Project Essay Example for Free

The Annual Report Project Essay General Electric, short as GE, is a leading multi-industrial company involving in energy, appliance, finance and transportation businesses. It has more than 100 years of history, and generally be viewed as one of the most successful product and service providers across continents. GE has gross revenue of more than 147 billion dollars, and is currently ranking No.6 in Fortune 500 U.S. by revenue. A. Introduction General Electric Company (GE) is a multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, United States. Its core business contains four segments, including Energy, Finance, Technology infrastructure, and Consumer and Industrial. GE was founded initially by Thomas Edison, and then merged with Thomson-Houston Electronic Company in 1892. It was one the original 12 companies that were included for Dow Jones Industrial Average calculation in 1896, and is the only one that still being listed as of today. * Name of the Chief Executive Officer: Jeffrey R. Immelt * Corporate Headquarters: 3135 Easton Turnpike, Fairfield, CT 06828 * Ending of last fiscal year: Dec 31, 2011 * Description of the company’s principle products or services: General Electronic contains four major business sectors. GE Energy is constructed by two major departments. The Oil Gas department is a drill solution and refinery service provider, and the power department is one of the leading manufactures in designing and producing innovative, reliable, efficient, and high-performance jet engines. GE Technology Infrastructure is a business group dealing with machine production for healthcare and transportation. GE Capital is the financial service provider primarily focuses on loans and leases that it underwrites to hold on its own balance sheet rather than on generating fee by originating loans and leases. GE Home Business Solutions is another GE major business unit composed of intelligent platforms department and lighting department. The intelligent platforms are involving in producing next generation hardware and software for industrial control, and lighting department mainly engaged in home appliance production and maintenance. * Main geographic area of activity (in order of revenue significance): United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa. * Name of Company’s independent accountants (KPMG LLP). Base on the analysis of independent auditor, the GE consolidated financial statements released to the public presented fairly, in a whole, the financial position of GE as the date of Dec 31, 2011 and 2010. Also, the statements of operations and cash flows for the three consecutive years from 2009 to 2011 are conformed to U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). The independent accountants also declared that the GE maintained effective internal control over financial reporting as of Dec 31 2011, according to the criteria established in Internal Control-Integrated Framework issued by COSO. * The most recent price of company’s stock and its dividend per share The current price of GE stock is $20.62 as of Nov 20, 2012. The most recent dividend payment date was Oct 25, 2012 (record date was Sep 24, 2012) with amount per share of $0.17. B. Industry Situation and Company Plans GE Energy unit is a product and service provider across different energy industries, including coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear power and renewable energy like wind or solar energy. In general, global energy business experienced a boosting period in the past twenty years due to the economic rapid growth in Asia. Coal, Oil and natural gas are top 3 widely used fossil fuels in energy industry, accounting for 55% of total energy demands. GE Energy has the advantage of applying advanced technology from drilling and production, liquefied natural gas pipelines and storage to industrial power generation and it is the largest natural gas provider in U.S. Based on GE’s patents on renewable energy, it greatly expands its business cooperation in Asia in the past three years within the countries that have great environmental issues, like China. In 2009~20011, GE acquired two wind turbine companies, Scan Wind and Wind Tower System, and became one of the largest engine manufactures, second o nly to well-known British company, Rolls-Royce plc. Healthcare in GE Technology Infrastructure business unit takes the dominant position in the field of diagnostic imaging service and integrated clinical system providers. While it has offices around the globe, the Healthcare department has major regional operation in Europe and Asia. Transportation in GE Technology Infrastructure business unit basically produces locomotive and its accompanied equipment, large electric motors and propulsion systems for mining, oil drilling and engine industries. Because of its comparative advantage of research and development, the GE Transportation unit experienced a fast expansion in the past several years, and in 2011 they announced plans to build another locomotive factory in Texas to meet the increasing demand. GE Capital has two major parts of services, aviation services, and energy financial services. The aviation service is responsible for the leasing of aircraft and associate equipment to airlines. According to 2005 Airfinance Journal Operating Lessor Survey, GE aviation service department is the largest aircraft lessor in the world by the fleet size. The success of this business is primarily due to the heavily competition between the airlines, and each airline company intends to lease cheap aircraft to reduce their cost. The capital intensive companies, like GE, has the advantage to meet their needs. Energy financial services department is primarily responsible for auxiliary role such as providing financial and technological investment in energy infrastructure projects around the world, and their major investments are the projects across the different business segment of the General Electric. GE Home Business Solutions is composed of GE Lighting and GE Intelligent Platforms. GE Lighting is well known for its household appliance traced back from Thomas Edison’s work on lighting. Because of its dominant position in the business, lighting department generates descent amount of the revenues for the whole group. In 2011 the gross revenue for GE Lighting is about 3 billion. Intelligent Platforms departments designs, manufactures, and supplies hardware and software products for industrial control and automation. Their hardware products including programmable logic controllers (PLCs), programmable automation controllers (PACs), as well as software products including supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) has good reputation in the market, its major role is to provide research and development support for other GE business units to evolve their products. The revenue in Intelligent Platforms is about 135 million, and is not a huge profit resource for the whole grou p.