GE names vice chairman Rice to lead global growth and operations

The General Electric board of directors has named John G. Rice to lead the company’s global operations. Rice, a GE vice chairman since 2005, will be in charge of GE’s growth outside the United States. Rice will relocate to Hong Kong and his appointment is effective January 1, 2011.

“John Rice has served customers, built partnerships and done deals around the world for more than 20 years,” said GE chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt. “He is well known and respected by global business and government leaders and our employees. We are entering a period of great opportunity in global markets and, as a result, our teams must be more decentralized, faster and more local."

“We are raising the stature of everything global in GE,” Immelt said. “John will lead teams that will use our local domain strength and talent to execute our growth and export strategies.”

Rice, 53, will be responsible for all non-U.S. markets with particular emphasis on high-growth markets such as China, India, the Middle East and Brazil where he will accelerate GE’s efforts to meet customer needs with GE’s leading technology and services. In many of these markets, this includes GE’s “company to country” growth strategy in which GE works directly with governments to meet local needs.

“We expect global sales to be about 60 percent of GE going forward,” Immelt said. “Our global growth has expanded by about 15 percent a year for most of the past decade and we expect it to continue in the future,” Immelt said.

Rice will oversee 12 integrated local organizations that will include business development, commercial teams, finance, controllership and legal. This will include China, India, Southeast Asia, Latin/South America, Russia, Canada, Australia, the Middle East, Africa, Germany, Europe and Japan/Korea.

In his 32-year GE career, Rice has led two of GE’s most global businesses, Energy and Transportation. Since 2007, Rice had led GE’s Technology Infrastructure business, which included Aviation, Transportation and Healthcare. Those businesses will now report directly to Immelt and report financial results separately beginning in 2011. A full bio for Rice is available here.

Nani Beccalli, who has successfully built GE’s global team for the past nine years, will continue to lead Europe, Japan and Korea reporting to Rice. In addition, Beccalli will build and lead a new “One GE” approach in Germany, in which leaders from across GE’s businesses in that market report to Beccalli. GE established a similar “P&L” structure in India last year.

“We are able to take this next step in our growth as a global company because of the strong foundation that Nani Beccalli built over the past nine years,” Immelt said. “Germany offers significant growth opportunities for GE and we need an experienced leader like Nani to use his deep expertise and extensive network of contacts to build a ‘One GE’ approach in Germany.”

“With John’s and Nani’s leadership and more integrated local teams, we will be a better and more competitive global company – with more local business development, customer support, research and product development,” Immelt said.

Immelt has made improving GE’s global capabilities a priority since becoming CEO in 2001. In that time, GE has diversified and built its global resources, adding local talent, research and development capabilities and sales and marketing assets in growth markets. GE also has become one of the biggest exporters from the United States, selling more than $18 billion worth of U.S.-made goods and services outside America in 2009, up from $7 billion in 2001, for average growth of more than 12 percent. As a result of this global growth, GE has created thousands of new manufacturing jobs in the United States in the last two years.