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Troubled South African State power utility Eskom should place emphasis on stability ahead of improvement, GE chairperson and CEO Jeffrey Immelt suggested on Monday.
Speaking at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) in Johannesburg, the head of the 137-year-old, 350 000-employee US company, which has a market capitalisation of $240-billion, was also of the view that it would be inappropriate for countries in Africa to opt for nuclear power at this stage.
In response to Creamer Media’s question on how GE could help Eskom become more efficient, the CEO of the world’s largest infrastructure technology company said the State power utility’s problems had taken long to create and would take long to put right.
“They won’t be fixed overnight,” Immelt commented.
Rather than implementing challenging nuclear power, he believed in always trying to do the easy things first and providing nuclear would be hard.
He viewed the South African market on its own as being insufficiently large to attract significant volumes of foreign investment and advocated the creation of an enlarged Southern African regional market.
“The South African market on its own is not big enough to do things to scale,” he commented at question time.
GE South Africa, which employs more than 450 people at its South African office in Midrand, has its electrical distribution equipment in nine Eskom power stations and is reportedly investing R700-million to develop critical skills and small businesses locally.
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