GE has had an official branch in Moscow since 1974. In the 2000s, the company opened regional offices in CIS countries. GE offices in Russia represent all of the company’s business interests, including healthcare, transportation, aviation, electric power, oil and gas, water treatment and lighting.
Speaking with General Electric CEO and President Jeffrey R. Immelt
Transcript of the beginning of the meeting:
Dmitry Medvedev: Welcome, Mr Immelt. The timing is right for you to hold a board of directors meeting in Russia. We are in the middle of the Russian winter, which is symbolic if you think about the vast number of projects that General Electric runs in our country. I hope that the board meeting will be productive in light of the long history of relations between your company and the Russian Federation and the Soviet Union before that. However, today we are dealing with new participants and new pages in history. An agreement with Rosneft will be signed today to establish a research and engineering centre. We appreciate this cooperation, mindful of the challenges that Russian industry and business are faced with today, and the vast experience of your group of companies.
I believe we’ll discuss the most important projects today. The prospects for cooperation seem very positive, especially since we are very interested in improving the energy efficiency of the Russian economy which is not yet where we want it to be. In this respect, we would like our partners to share their successes in this area. Of course, there are many other major programmes for you to participate in, including important areas like medicine.
Jeffrey R. Immelt (via interpreter): Thank you, Mr Prime Minister, for your warm words of welcome and your hospitality. We are honoured to be here today with you. There are many areas where General Electric and Russia work together based on our long-term partnership. We are a large infrastructure company. We use various technologies, and we are working with Rosneft, which is good. In recent years we have created many cooperative ventures. I will touch on some of the key opportunities that we see today.
We are about to complete the construction of a gas turbine plant that will be quite productive and which will supply high-quality gas turbines to the Russian and international markets. This is a great product that will provide combined and central heating using excess gas as fuel. Production will begin this summer and the manufacturing capacity will be quite high.
Our plans also include localising various oil and gas production processes that can be used in partnership with Rosneft, Exxon and our other partners that operate in Russia, including the manufacture of compression machines for the power engineering industry. We believe that bringing our technology to Russia is important.
In addition, there will be a research centre that will augment national economic capacity. Gas monetisation and new ways of using gas are a major global trend, and Russia can become a leader in this area, a focal point of these processes.
We are also working with Transmash. We believe that localising the production of diesel manufacturing plants and using locomotives that run on compressed natural gas is quite a promising area of business. We believe that this can be done in Russia as well.
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Signing a joint document
Rosneft and General Electric signed an agreement, in the presence of Dmitry Medvedev, to establish a joint venture to create an Applied Engineering and Training Centre and a Research Centre in Russia.
