GE: Africa needs “the best intellectual horsepower”

When you look at the needs on this great continent and what a billion people have to have, it’s going to need the best intellectual horsepower, the best human capital and the best financial capital from lots of different places.

China can be a very important source – it has been and will continue to be – but to me it’s not a competition. There’s a synergy there and companies like ours will always have a role to play here. If we continue to develop technology and develop capability and develop training techniques, there will always be room for us in Africa.

It’s important that the financial might that China has created is brought to bear in a way that helps Africa develop too.

How do you compete with that financial might? Will you be using your balance sheet or will you be taking advantage of the Power Africa initiative?

We do all of the above. We will look at partnering, where it makes sense, with Chinese companies; we will use our balance sheet selectively, we’ll do a little bit more in project development to get to the point where we have bankable projects and we’ll work very hard with other financial institutions to make sure that all the pools of capital that exist in the world that are looking for investments find their way to Africa infrastructure projects over the right period of time.

And in terms of big markets in Africa, is Angola the biggest in the oil and gas sector?

Angola is quite big but the size of the markets varies year to year. Angola and Nigeria, typically, have been large markets.

But, actually, if you look at the entire continent, Algeria was the biggest last year because we had a very significant gas turbine order. This was one of the largest gas turbine orders in our history and it illustrates the point I have tried to make, in that we have to respond to the local requirements.

Algeria took the opportunity to put out a tender for a set of gas turbine requirements that will accommodate what they need for the next 10 years or so, and so we put a lot into fulfilling their need.
In Angola, most of our work is around the oil and gas space with a little bit of power generation and so we put our focus there; and in Nigeria it’s a combination of things around oil and gas, power generation and healthcare and, we hope, some more transportation or rail.

And you’re looking to sign more Country to Company agreements in the future?

We are. We’re going to look to renew the one that we have in Nigeria and we’re working on that now.

We like to do these agreements but we do them in countries where the government’s aligned and supportive of it.

Not every country has the alignment or is interested in memorialising that way. We don’t use that as a reason to be or not to be in a country.

These agreements are very helpful because they ensure that we’re aligned with the country’s priorities; it’s a statement from the government that says this is what’s important to us and here’s how a company like GE can help.

It helps align the bureaucratic effort in a government and it helps keep a company like GE alive – so we have an expression of commitments to a country, and all of our businesses can look at that and understand what that is and then measure up to the expectation.