Monday, June 29, 2009

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New GE centre adds more than 1,100 jobs in Michigan

General Electric, the world’s biggest maker of power-generation equip-ment and jet engines, opened a research centre that may add more than 1,100 jobs in Michigan, the state with the highest US unemployment rate. The Advanced Manu-facturing and Software Technology Centre will be about 40 km outside Detroit, the Fairfield, the company said. It will take advantage of a pool of out-of-work engineers and scientists as the US auto industry’s centre shrinks and GE develops more efficient products.

GE, also the world’s biggest maker of locomo-tives and medical-imaging machines, said it will invest about $100 million to build the new site and benefit from more than $60 million in state incentives over 12 years. “We’ve found Michigan to be aggressive and a good partner,” chief executive officer Jeffrey Immelt said in a news conference. “We view this as a long-term commitment. We’ve looked at this downturn as a way to launch more investment faster.”

The centre, which will create all new, Michigan-based jobs, will “definitely” include renewable energy components like wind turbines, said Immelt, who is on president Barack Obama’s board of economic advisers. GE is the biggest wind-turbine maker in the US. Existing space on the site will be used for software and health-care information-technology development, GE said. Immelt said the US must be a “strong exporting country” to help speed recovery from the economic slump.

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