Word: ge
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Maytag's competitors in Asia can take advantage of cheaper labor costs, but LG's and Samsung's real advantage is quality: $1,000 washing machines compete with the best ones from GE and Whirlpool. "They're really competing on products, not price," says Eric Bosshard, an analyst at FTN Midwest. Maytag has been slow to keep up; its last new front-loading washer debuted in 1997. Until those new product lines are ready, Maytag can't take advantage of lower costs at its newer, more efficient plants in South Carolina and Mexico, which make them. To stay afloat...
...most incendiary environmental issue, dredging the Hudson of PCBs, GE lobbyists have been unrelenting. One of them, Roger France, is the former chief of staff to Representative Charles Taylor, who received $8,250 from GE for his 2004 re-election. At the company's request, the North Carolina Republican inserted language in a spending bill calling for the National Academy of Sciences to study PCB-contaminated sites and produce a new cost-benefit analysis of dredging, which critics say GE could use to curtail the Hudson cleanup. GE has long insisted that the prudent course of action on the Hudson...
Despite Immelt's pledge that it's a new green day at GE, it would be a mistake to think the company has quit protecting its less eco-friendly interests. GE has a history of opposing environmental regulations that don't suit the firm. In 2000, superstar lawyer Laurence Tribe asked the U.S. Supreme Court, on GE's behalf, to throw out EPA standards for smog and soot (the court declined). In 2003, GE was part of an industry coalition that lobbied for revised EPA regulations allowing utilities and refineries to modernize their oldest and dirtiest facilities, in some cases...
Told of the Taylor amendment, Immelt remarked, "I wasn't even aware that's the case ... We are who we are." GE would continue to defend its interests, he added. GE has reserved the cash for the Hudson cleanup, estimated to cost $500 million, and is cooperating with the EPA on a project design, he says. Nonetheless, the dredging operation, ordered in 2002 and scheduled to start in 2006, was recently delayed by a year. And GE may still legally challenge an EPA order to perform the cleanup or sue the agency to recoup costs...
Ultimately, GE's contradictory behavior on the environment is completely rational. Selling green goods represents growth and profit. Spending money to comply with antipollution laws and paying for cleanups represent cost centers--and every GE exec knows you reduce cost and feed growth. No wonder, then, that Immelt dismisses the naysayers on either side of his green initiative--the environmentalists who grouse that GE is being hypocritical and the conservatives who complain that companies should not spend an extra cent on the environment since that wastes economic resources. "There are just some people you don't listen to," he says...