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Mr. Immelt, just four years into his job, is already shaping a company that may become best known for selling products and expertise to a whole new set of customers: the governments in the developing world, and the businesses they run.

He has little choice: G.E. is running smack into the law of big numbers. In 1981, when Mr. Welch, took the helm, G.E. was earning $1.7 billion on revenue of $25 billion. By the time Mr. Immelt took over on Sept. 7, 2001, G.E. was topping $28 billion in earnings and $130 billion in revenue. Analysts expect it will exceed $170 billion in sales this year.

Mr. Immelt has often promised that G.E.'s revenue will grow at least at an 8 percent annual clip, and that its profits will grow even faster. Skeptics abound. "That's a pretty herculean task, and the odds are against his delivering," warned Robert Friedman, an analyst with S.&P. Equity Research, who has a hold recommendation on G.E. shares.

Indeed, Mr. Immelt knows that G.E.'s traditional customers -- the airplane manufacturers that buy engines and services, the hospitals that buy CAT scanners, the utilities that buy turbines -- cannot provide that growth. But the governments of China and India, or even Vietnam and Abu Dhabi, with their vast needs for power, rail and air transportation, clean water, health care and, eventually, consumer finance, just might turn to G.E., one of the few true conglomerates, to meet all those needs.

G.E. already gets about half of its revenue from outside the United States. But only about $25 billion, or 15 percent, comes from emerging countries. Mr. Immelt has said he expects that figure to more than double by 2010.

More important, he wants at least 60 percent of G.E.'s incremental revenue growth to come from such countries, and analysts applaud that thought. "The developing world is G.E.'s best option for delivering sustainable double-digit growth over the next 5 to 10 years," said Deane M. Dray, an analyst at Goldman Sachs who rates G.E. shares as outperform.

Ferdinando Beccalli-Falco, chief executive of GE International and its self-described "minister of foreign affairs," insists that G.E. is in prime shape to exercise that option. "We're hitting the sweet spot between the needs of these countries and our product portfolio," he said.

That sweet spot could quickly sour, of course. Dealing with volatile governments and cultures is rarely as easy as dealing with customers like Boeing, or even Airbus. "One thing we learned from the Roman Empire, the geopolitical risks get more dangerous as you move farther from Rome," said Richard D. Steinberg, the president of Steinberg Global Asset Management, which counts G.E. shares as its largest holding.

Still, despite the caveat, "G.E. is taking the right route to growth," Mr. Steinberg said.

Other investors agree. "Developing countries provide perfect opportunities for G.E. to leverage its strength and size," said Roger R. Threlfall, a senior managing analyst at the Dreyfus Corporation, which holds G.E. shares.

So just as Mr. Welch expanded G.E. by offering to help corporate customers thrive, Mr. Immelt has been offering the leaders of developing nations help in building their economies. "I'm fast becoming G.E.'s chief sales rep," Mr. Immelt said.

Indeed, most of the management and marketing changes he has made, although seemingly unrelated at first glance, are aimed at helping G.E. develop a company-to-country marketing approach.

He has invested in industries he calls "growth engines" -- many of them, like water, security and health care, with particular appeal to developing countries. He has inaugurated an internal "imagination breakthrough" program, asking G.E.'s executives to come up with new ideas for growth, including better ways of doing business in the developing world.

One plan that G.E. expects will soon yield $100 million in sales involves shipping unassembled locomotives to Russia, India and China, and hiring locals to assemble them.

Mr. Immelt split the cumbersome GE Capital into four businesses, a move he described as making the financial services arm more transparent to investors, but that he now says makes it easier to meld "financial strategies and industrial assets."

For example, the units that lease airplanes or that finance energy systems now report to Mr. Calhoun, as do the units that make aircraft engines and oil and gas systems. That makes it easier to start the ball rolling on financing as a developing country is warming up to the idea of buying planes or turbines.

Mr. Immelt also introduced, amid much hoopla, an "eco-imagination" program, in which he promised that G.E. would create more environment-friendly products as well as curb pollution emanating from its own operations. He already predicts that G.E. "is going to get a bunch" of the $80 billion that it expects China to spend on fuel-efficient, low-pollutant products.

"We wanted a marketing campaign that could span lots of our divisions, and hooking it to the environment seemed logical," Mr. Immelt said.

Then, last month, he tied the seemingly disparate initiatives together. He said that, as of July 5, G.E.'s 11 businesses would be consolidated into 6: GE Industrial; GE Commercial Financial Services; NBC Universal; GE Healthcare; GE Consumer Finance and, perhaps most important, GE Infrastructure, the one with the headiest growth prospects.

The consolidation may yield savings of $200 million to $300 million in administrative costs, adding as much as 2 cents a share to G.E.'s earnings next year.

"Jeff has transformed the portfolio so that the company is again focused on the industrial end," said Daniel J. Rosenblatt, an analyst with Babson Capital Management, which holds G.E. shares in several growth funds.

The reorganization was a back-to-the-future move of sorts, in that the new setup is more reminiscent of the eight business sectors that existed under Reginald H. Jones, Mr. Welch's predecessor, than of the 13 businesses that Mr. Immelt inherited four years ago.

"Jack got rid of the strategic planners, the multiple staff support positions, all the bureaucracy that existed with the old sectors," said Noel M. Tichy, a professor at the University of Michigan Business School. "Jeff has simplified the structure to make it easier for customers to understand."

Mr. Immelt's changes do bring risks. Although energy and aircraft-related financing will be part of GE Infrastructure, GE Capital retains the final say on whether any customer poses an "acceptable risk" for a loan, a hurdle that may be hard for developing countries to overcome. "If a customer asks for financing, we will bring everything we have to bear to try to get it," said Mr. Calhoun, who is on the GE Capital board.

The environmental push, meanwhile, may refocus a spotlight on an issue that has dogged G.E. for years: whether it should be responsible for dredging the Hudson River to remove chemicals that it legally discharged some 30 years ago.

Mr. Immelt said that G.E. had made a "defined set of commitments" to the Environmental Protection Agency and has set aside money to clean up the Hudson. But many environmental groups still criticize G.E. for what they see as recalcitrance, and have branded the eco-imagination project as primarily a public relations campaign.

Moreover, G.E. must set up assembly plants and otherwise invest in the developing world. "These are cash-consuming areas, so the immediate return on total capital might be low," said Steven J. Schneider, the president of G.E.'s Asia Pacific operations.

In addition, G.E. faces competition from companies like Nalco in water, United Technologies in aircraft engines and Siemens in health care.

Still, for G.E., the allure of selling to the developing world trumps the risks. Such deals would extend the life cycle of many products. Mr. Immelt noted that older aircraft sell well in Russia, while India is a prime market for lower-end X-ray machines.

The strategy can shelter G.E. from the impact of soaring oil prices, in that "higher oil prices will enable the OPEC countries to spend large sums on their own infrastructure," said David A. Bleustein, an analyst at UBS Investment Research, who rates G.E. a buy.

And, by selling infrastructure in developing countries now, G.E. may also be increasing the chance that, if and when wealth trickles down to the working class, those people will turn to G.E. for credit cards, loans and other consumer finance assistance.

Mr. Immelt concedes that the G.E. brand, for now, is fairly obscure in those countries. "Because we don't sell consumer products, we just aren't as well known outside the U.S.," he said.

G.E. is already finding ways to remedy that. The research center it opened in Shanghai last year includes a huge atrium in which G.E.'s products are showcased. G.E. will soon double the center's size.

"We still locate our centers where we can get access to the best minds," Mr. Immelt said. "But, yes," he conceded, "these days, at least 20 percent of the decision is marketing."

Correction: July 18, 2005, Monday An article in Business Day on Saturday about General Electric's international sales efforts misstated the company's 2001 earnings. They were $13.684 billion, not $30 billion.

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G.E. Becomes a General Store for Developing Countries

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Mr. Immelt, just four years into his job, is already shaping a company that may become best known for selling products and expertise to a whole new set of customers: the governments in the developing world, and the businesses they run. He has little choice: G.E.

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Its 'Ecomagination' is producing green ideas-and profits.

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How many differences could you list between the economy of 2015 and that of 1892? Quite a few, I'll bet. But one thing has remained constant: the endless stream of innovation in energy from ( General Electric Company NYSE:GE) that has and will continue to power the global economy to new heights. What's the significance of those two dates?

The company was formed in 1892, when banker-tycoon J.P. Morgan arranged a megamerger between Edison General Electric, a company powered by the inventions of Thomas Edison, and Thomson-Houston Electric, a leading competitor. At the time, General Electric was focused on creating and developing the industries responsible for generating and distributing electricity -- the first time it became commercially and economically feasible for the masses to benefit from electric power.

Today, in 2015, the company isn't an electric utility, but it plays a direct role in enabling power generation from every major energy source used globally. Whether manufacturing super efficient gas turbines, designing the world's largest wind turbines, or developing next-generation nuclear power plants, General Electric is still powering the future of energy just as it did 123 years ago. That's great news for individual investors like you.

"Holy Grail" of gas turbine efficiency
When it comes to generating power from natural gas, efficiency is king. The reasons are obvious. A power plant that maximizes energy production from a unit of fuel will realize lower production costs and monetize more energy for its owners. But there has been one major drawback weighing on gas power plant efficiency: energy that escapes as waste heat.

The race has been on to build gas turbines that allow power generators to capture as much waste heat as possible, feed it to a steam turbine, and generate electricity in side-by-side fashion to boost the overall efficiency of a power plant. These combined power cycles should be capable of achieving or besting the "Holy Grail" of the power generation industry, the journalism-friendly term for 61% power efficiency. The race isn't over, but the front runners are emerging.

General Electric spent more than $1 billion developing HArriet (the 9HA), the largest and most efficient gas turbine in the world. When used in a combined power cycle, it can achieve power efficiencies greater than 61%, generate 600 MW of power (enough to power 600,000 homes), and, if similar to a competing design from Siemens, reduce natural gas consumption and carbon dioxide emissions of a power plant by 33% each.

The first 9HA gas turbine will be put into service in France in 2016. In the meantime, General Electric will be busy keeping up with 15 backlog orders from around the world with a value of $1.8 billion. That includes four smaller units with a combined capacity of 2,000 MW sold to ( Exelon NYSE:EXC), which will deploy the fleet to steady the grid in Texas. Investors can bet that these orders are only the beginning of a big growth opportunity.

World-leading wind turbine manufacturer
As initial sales of next-generation gas turbines seed a new opportunity, investors can rely on more established growth opportunities to keep churning out profits, too. Along with Vestas and Siemens, General Electric is one of the "Big Three" wind turbine manufacturers selling into the American market. While the group accounted for 95% of all 4,850-MW of installations in 2014, General Electric led the pack with 2,750 MW, followed by a distant Siemens (1,241 MW) and Vestas (584 MW).

Over its lifetime as a wind turbine manufacturer, General Electric has installed more than 18,000 turbines worldwide, with a combined power capacity of 28,000 MW. At the end of 2013, that represented nearly 9% of the world's total installed wind capacity, which is growing at an eye-opening clip. In fact, the world adds more wind power capacity every year than it had installed in 2002, a trend that has held since 2009.

General Electric is well-positioned to capitalize on the growing momentum represented in the chart above. The current portfolio offers power generators such as NextEra Energy and Ivenergy wind turbines that range from 1.7 MW to 3.2 MW apiece. Spread a few dozen out over a large enough area, and boom, you get a wind farm with several hundred megawatts of renewable power capacity that can rival the output of most fossil fuel power plants.

Next-generation nuclear reactors
How's this for irony? Exelon, the nation's largest nuclear power generator, has slowly watched wind farms in the Midwest erode the competitiveness and profitability of its nuclear assets with their sporadic supply of power. Mounting pressure to insulate margins and boost profitability was a driving factor in Exelon's decision to purchase General Electric's next-generation gas turbines, which can be turned on and off relatively easily to cope with instability in the electricity grid and are accompanied by higher-margin power generation.

Well, by next decade, General Electric could offer Exelon a more direct solution to its nuclear woes. Large, centralized nuclear power plants are simply not well adapted to an electricity grid chocked full of intermittent renewable energy generation. But small, distributed nuclear power plants could offer added flexibility. Powered by small modular reactors such as General Electric's PRISM, future nuclear facilities could be built for a fraction of the cost of their supersized predecessors -- one of the major drawbacks of traditional nuclear power.

General Electric's PRISM offers more advantages than size. The Generation IV reactor can consume used nuclear fuels to generate carbon-free power while offering a long-term solution to nuclear waste, in addition to transforming global plutonium stockpiles into nonproliferation-friendly atomic elements. While PRISM is still being developed and has yet to receive a green light to be commercially deployed, the first reactors could go into service before 2030. The next time you hear the phrase "nuclear is dead," be sure to remember to clarify the differences between traditional nuclear and next-generation technologies.

What does it mean for investors?
Despite being formed over 120 years ago, General Electric remains at the forefront of established and emerging energy industries. The company is poised to capture amazing growth for years to come after investing billions of dollars developing world-leading gas turbines, wind turbines, and next-generation nuclear reactors that will power the future of energy. As it turns out, one of the biggest differences between 1892 and 2015 is that you don't need to be J.P. Morgan to enjoy the growth and earnings machine that is General Electric.

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3 Ways General Electric Company Will Power the Future of Energy

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How many differences could you list between the economy of 2015 and that of 1892? Quite a few, I'll bet. But one thing has remained constant: the endless stream of innovation in energy from ( General Electric Company NYSE:GE) that has and will continue to power the global economy to new heights.

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( General Electric NYSE:GE) hasn't been a simple business since Thomas Edison founded the conglomerate's first ancestor. A hundred years ago, Edison Electric had already adopted its new name, and had branched out from making electric light bulbs to locomotives, ceramic stove tops, power generators, X-ray machines, and plastics.
Anders Bylund has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends National Oilwell Varco. The Motley Fool owns shares of Citigroup, General Electric, and National Oilwell Varco. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Nothing much has changed in the last century. GE is still around and it still runs one of the largest, most complex industrial conglomerates on the planet. You might expect GE to compete with other heavy manufacturing groups, such as (( Honeywell International or United Technologies, and you'd be right -- but that's far from GE's whole story. The company also faces off against more surprising rivals, like National Oilwell Varco NYSE:NOV) and Citigroup NYSE:C).

No joke. This old company really gets around. So, how does today's General Electric make money? Let's take a deeper look at GE's sprawling operations.

Starting with a world map, General Electric is very much a global business.

The U.S. market is key, of course, representing 47% of GE's sales in 2013. But that still leaves 53% coming from abroad.

And the geographic mix is changing. Sales have remained stable in the Americas over the last two years, while European revenues fell by 10%. Making up for the Old World drop, GE expanded sales by 10% in Asia and 13% in the Middle East and Africa segment.

In other words, GE's meat and potatoes are still served at home, but the company is very connected to the world's fastest-growing economies.

That's what GE looks like today.

30% of the conglomerates sales come from GE Capital, the financial arm. This is why some compare GE to global banks like Citigroup. The company is selling off its financial services for consumers to refocus on business-class banking operations. This includes fleet management services, commercial loans, and commercial leases.

General Electric and GE Capital used to sport a AAA Standard & Poor's credit rating, which is the highest possible credit quality. After the 2008-2009 financial crash, these ratings have dropped to AA+ -- still the second highest rating in S&P's system.

GE Capital exited 2013 with $380 billion in Ending Net Investment, which is GE Capital's closest thing to the Basel III assets reported by other large banks. That's down from $419 billion in 2012 and $445 billion in 2011, and GE has its sights set on reaching an ENI as low as $300 billion.

This company wants to become less of a megabank, and more of an industrial powerhouse. In 2011, GE held about 35% as much invested capital as Citigroup -- not bad for a supposed industrial complex! Today, the GE-to-Citigroup capital ratio is down to 32%.

Digging deeper into the industrial side of the house, you'll find four very large sub-divisions and three smaller operations. But even here, the mix is changing quickly.

GE has grown its energy management sales by 18% in the last two years, while oil and gas services jumped 25% higher. In a series of energy-focused acquisitions, GE is indeed becoming comparable to National Oilwell and other giants of petroleum drilling and transport equipment.

Treating GE's energy management and oil segments as a unified business, its $25 billion in 2013 revenues would have surpassed National Oilwell's total sales. GE's energy equipment and services would still rank behind the absolute top layer of this industry, but we're still looking at one of the top names in oil drilling supplies. Again, not bad for a diversified conglomerate.

And GE is still working on its ideal business mix, here. If the proposed $13.5 billion buyout of French rival Alstom's power plant and electrical grid operations passes regulatory muster, the deal would instantly boost GE's power and water sales by 80%. This would go a long way toward boosting industrial sales past 75% of total revenue, which is another of GE's stated long-term goals.

Let's finish up with GE's segment sales over time. This is how the company has rebalanced its operating portfolio in the last five years. The blue wedge that disappeared in 2011 mainly consists of the NBC Universal media division, which was sold to Comcast for $30 billion.

That's a high-level view of GE's complex operations. Long story short:

GE rakes in about half of its sales from the Americas and the rest from distant shores.

Financial services are huge but destined to shrink.

You should expect the industrial mix to change often.

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( General Electric NYSE:GE) hasn't been a simple business since Thomas Edison founded the conglomerate's first ancestor. A hundred years ago, Edison Electric had already adopted its new name, and had branched out from making electric light bulbs to locomotives, ceramic stove tops, power generators, X-ray machines, and plastics.

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Learn more about GE locations and awards. Find a brief summary of GE's history, a breakdown of business and more on the Corporate Fact Sheet. NUMBERS

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Thomas Edison & The History of Electricity

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Discover the story of how Thomas Edison and Charles A. Coffin formed the General Electric Company. See how GE's history continues to shape our future.

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the evolution of ge's product innovation strategy

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The Evolution of GE's Product Innovation Strategy by Heath Downie, Adela McMurray :: SSRN

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Innovation is a driver for sustainable growth (Hamel et al, 2008). Innovation factors such as capital investment and increased efficiency are considered to be r