WCA November 2015

From the Americas

In September, Ms Vestager pronounced herself satisfied that this would not happen. At the news conference in Strasbourg, France, at which the GE-Alstom deal was announced, she said that the divestitures to Ansaldo would avoid “a great risk of choice going down and prices going up.”  In other news of General Electric, CEO Jeffrey Immelt told the business news TV channel CNBC that the company expects to decide on a new location for its headquarters before the end of this year. GE had been mulling a move out of Fairfield, Connecticut, since June, when state lawmakers passed a budget that includes $1.2 billion in tax increases despite protests from some of the state’s biggest corporations. Reuters observed that the loss of GE is likely to be a huge blow to Connecticut, which bled thousands of jobs after the financial crisis and has been one of the slowest states to recover from the recession. Its gross domestic product (GDP) grew less than one per cent in 2014, compared with 2.4 per cent growth for the USA as a whole. With a Boston railway car contract in hand, a Chinese builder of high-speed rail systems broadens its US ambitions “As you know, about 100 years ago USA infrastructure was leading the way. But after 100 years it still has a lot of room to grow and create opportunities.” This tactful view was expressed to the New York Times by a man who knows something of opportunity: Yu Weiping, the vice president for international business of the China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation. State-owned CRRC broke ground in September for a $60 million plant in Springfield, Massachusetts, that will provide new cars for the Boston transit system. The plant, which will hire 150 people, is part of a $566 million contract awarded last year under which CRRC is to provide 284 cars for Boston’s Orange and Red Lines. It is the first Chinese railway car manufacturing company to win a major transit contract in the United States. “The company sees the plant as a potential beachhead to win more contracts in the United States,” wrote the Times ’s Jad Mouawad. He sees the deal, China’s biggest push in the American railroad market, as an example of Beijing’s policy of encouraging its technology and infrastructure companies to export their skills and seek foreign markets. (“Chinese Rail Firm Makes Inroads with US Factory and Boston Transit Deal,” 3 rd September) CRRC, which beat out Canada’s Bombardier, among other competitors, included in its bid a provision to assemble the rail cars in Massachusetts. The new plant, on a 40-acre industrial lot in a former Westinghouse manufacturing centre, will begin operations in 2016, with deliveries to commence in 2018. Transportation

encompasses coaxial cables, replaced by fibre optic systems in 1988 – some 11 cables needed repair, and fish bites accounted for 0.5 per cent of all cable faults. The most recent analysis – covering 2007 to 2014 – recorded no cable faults attributable to sharks. The reduction in faults is seen as consistent with improved design, protective sheathings, and other measures to protect subsea technology. According to Smartgridnews.com , more problematic faults derive from natural phenomena like subsea landslides and ocean currents (less than ten per cent) and component failure (five per cent). Having put European antitrust concerns to rest, GE is approved for acquisition of the power business of Alstom of France General Electric Co of the USA, has gained the go-ahead from European antitrust regulators to buy most of Alstom SA’s energy business, advancing chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt’s goal of returning GE to its industrial roots after a diversification into finance by his predecessor. GE’s pledge to sell gas-turbine assets to an Italian rival, Ansaldo Energia SpA, helped allay concerns over the $9.5 billion plan, the European Commission said. Minutes later on 8 th September, the US Justice Department chimed in with its approval. “We got a deal that’s good for our customers and good for GE and good for our investors,” Mr Immelt said in a phone interview with BloombergBusiness . (“GE Wins EU-US Approval for Alstom Deal With Asset-Sale Vow,” 8 th September) The Bloomberg reporters Gaspard Sebag and Rick Clough noted that, in 2001, European regulators blocked GE’s projected takeover of the American engineering conglomerate Honeywell International – a failure that shadowed the review of the Alstom deal. With the Alstom assets it is buying, GE means to extend its global leadership in providing electrical utilities with generating equipment and power-grid distribution systems. Like rivals such as Siemens, of Germany, GE sees opportunity in that business as the world moves away from coal and toward cleaner natural gas, solar and wind energy.  Deane Dray, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets LLC, told Messrs Sebag and Clough that GE has its work cut out to integrate the large operation and achieve promised synergies of $3 billion in five years. But for now GE has the green light for its Alstom acquisition – an outcome which was far from inevitable. In February, when the European Union opened its investigation into the deal, EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager expressed concern that the combined company’s dominance might lead to higher prices and fewer options for customers. Energy

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Wire & Cable ASIA – November/December 2015