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Article Excerpt
SBD underscores that a well-organized sensor business with coordinated, integrated organizations in key regions of the world, a diversified but synergistic product offering, technical expertise in key sensor technologies, and the ability to provide value-added sensing solutions is particularly well-positioned to exert a highly significant influence in the sensor industry and to achieve robust growth. In the sensor industry, which contains many relatively small companies as well as sensor-focused organizations within some very large companies, a company that provides global sensing solutions across multiple, key market segments is in a superior competitive position in the marketplace.
A sensor business that has established a strong position in diverse yet major sensor markets, such as high-volume automotive medical, consumer, and telecommunications applications, as well as other key sectors, such as industrial process control and HVAC, is able to serve the needs of diverse market segments and to be successful despite economic challenges or fluctuations in demand from a particular market sector.
General Electric (Fairfield, CT)(NYSE:GE) has crafted a powerful sensor business-GE Infrastructure Sensing (Duluth, GA)-that encompasses and leverages a spate of key strategic acquisitions GE made during 2001-2003 and is a major force in diverse types of sensing elements, devices, instruments, and systems, including temperature sensors (e.g., thermistors, infrared thermopiles), capacitive and resistive bulk polymer relative humidity sensors, aluminum oxide moisture hygrometers, chilled mirror hygrometers, ultrasonic gas or liquid flow meters, zirconia and thermoparamagnetic oxygen analyzers, silicon micromachined pressure sensors, handheld and portable field calibrators, and pressure instrumentation.
GE Infrastructure, a high-technology platform comprised of some of the fastest growing GE businesses with revenues expected to approach $3.5 billion in 2004, includes (in addition to its sensing operations): Water Technologies (Trevose, PA), a provider of engineered specialty chemical treatment programs for water and process systems in industrial, commercial, and institutional facilities; GE Interlogix (Austin, TX), which focuses on communication and information technologies for security, safety, and life-style enhancements and provides solutions for intrusion and fire detection, access and building control, video surveillance, explosives and drug detection, and real estate services; and GE Fanuc Automation (Charlottesville, VA), a joint venture of GE and Fanuc Ltd that provides industrial automation hardware and software.
As part of a restructuring of GE's businesses as of January 2004, GE's sensor activities, previously encompassed within GE Measurement & Sensing Technologies (which was part of GE Industrial Systems), are now encompassed within GE Infrastructure Sensing (which is part of the GE Infrastructure business unit). The organizations comprising GE Infrastructure Sensing include GE Thermometrics (Edison, NJ), GE NovaSensor (Fremont, CA), GE Druck (Leicester, England)(which includes the SI Pressure Instruments and Ruska Instruments brands), GE General Eastern (Wilmington, MA)(which includes the Protimeter brand of moisture meters and hygrometers), GE Kaye (North Billerica, MA), and GE Panametrics (Waltham, MA).
Kermit Hoffman, president of GE Thermometrics, explained that the synergistic combination of the aforementioned organizations and brands enables GE Infrastructure Sensing to more fully establish sensors as a center of excellence within General Electric and, most importantly, provides greater value to customers. As an integrated organization, with a significant presence in major regions of the globe (e.g., North America, Europe, and the Far East), GE Infrastructure Sensing is able to provide very comprehensive, end-to-end, and diverse sensing and service solutions for customers involved a wide range of applications, such as automotive, medical, industrial, commercial/HVAC, telecommunications, environmental, marine, meteorology, aerospace/defense, pharmaceutical, food and beverage, biotechnology, petrochemical, power generation, and transportation.
Hoffman added that GE Infrastructure Sensing posseses several centers of excellence that have strong core competencies in a particular sensor technology or measurand. Existing centers of excellence include Fremont, CA (GE NovaSensor has considerable expertise in MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) pressure sensors and microstructures) and Edison, NJ (GE Thermometrics has long-standing expertise in, for example, NTC (negative temperature coefficient) thermistors). A...
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