GE’s Immelt Speaks on Outsourcing During His India Visit
Immelt was in Mumbai recently, during which visit he addressed the US-India Business and Entrepreneurship Summit.
“You guys are not living up to your side of the bargain,” Immelt told the room full of India’s top executives. “There is a trillion dollars of infrastructure investment in India and it’s not happening.”
Very easy for him to say!
Apart from that, “You guys are not living up to your side of the bargain,” is a very crude way to talk to India’s top industrialists, many of whom are probably more experienced and more educated than he is.
Another quote: “There is no reason that our [US companies] infrastructure revenues should not be the same as in China…Let’s make the infrastructure happen.”
If Immelt wants to pull in GE revenues for say, power plants, can he compete on value for money with the Chinese? Not likely. That being the case, is India supposed to buy billion of dollars of equipment from the US just so that the H1-B visa fee can be brought from around $4,000 back to around $2,000, which will save India a piffling $200 million a year? Or so that the Democrats can stop howling about outsourcing because research found that it would get them votes?
Come on, Mr. Immelt, India wasn’t born yesterday.
