GE to invest in Indonesia’s oil & gas sector

GE, an American multinational corporation, announced on Monday that it will invest up to $1 billion to support Indonesia’s economic growth, including investments in the oil and gas, power, and healthcare sectors.

The announcement was made on the sidelines of a meeting between the President of the Republic of Indonesia, Joko Widodo, and the President of United States of America, Barack Obama. The investment will be made in tandem with GE’s participation in the country’s infrastructure build-out.

Elaborating on the $1 billion program, GE’s Vice Chairman, John Rice, said, “Indonesia has been an important and strategic country for us for over 75 years and the current government’s vision and more recent plans to accelerate spending on infrastructure have given us the confidence to make this commitment. GE’s spending over the next 5 years will target critical areas important to the economy and cover power generation, oil and gas, and healthcare. Through this investment, we hope to expand our local business operations significantly, in a way that we believe will lead to a multiplier effect on the economy.”

According to GE, Indonesia has set an ambitious goal to increase power generation capacity by 35 GW by 2019. To facilitate achieving this goal, GE says it will bring its latest technology and will partner with local companies to expand their manufacturing and assembly capabilities, as well as enhance repair and service capabilities in country. In addition, GE says it will help build Indonesia’s human capital through technical and leadership training programs.

In the oil and gas space, GE’s investments will include expanding the current subsea equipment manufacturing facility to include other GE product lines, and partnering with local companies to expand manufacturing and assembly locally.

More than 90% of the equipment manufactured in its oil and gas facility such as subsea wellheads, surface wellheads, vertical christmas trees, tubular products and connectors used in oil and gas exploration and production is exported for use in global projects.

In the healthcare sector, GE will align with Indonesia’s objective of providing universal healthcare by supporting the expansion of the country’s primary healthcare ecosystem, including the development of up to 100 primary care clinics through technology and training innovations. Given the importance of healthcare for the country, GE relocated the headquarters of its healthcare business in ASEAN to Jakarta earlier this year.

GE says that these commitments will result in the creation of over 6,000 jobs, technology transfer, training of over 1,000 people a year, and the expansion of local supply chains as its business grows.