GE Healthcare Moving From U.K. to Chicago
GE Healthcare will be moving to the U.S. early in 2016 to set up headquarters in Chicago. GE Healthcare CEO John Flannery cited Chicago’s rich academic and healthcare environment, as well as proximity to an international transportation hub, as major factors contributing to the move.
GE Healthcare moved to the U.K. in 2003, with the $8.2 billion purchase of the small British medical imaging company Amersham, and was the first GE subsidiary to move overseas. In 2010, GE CEO Jeff Immelt called the Amersham acquisition “one of those deals that’s a 20-year deal you’re allowed to do on occasion,” and told The Guardian, “If you’re going to be in healthcare, you have to be in biotech and life sciences.”
While the head office for the global life sciences sector of GE Healthcare will remain in the U.K., Flannery said in a statement that the entire “senior executive leadership team” will be moving to Chicago, and that he does not anticipate any layoffs as a result of the change, reported the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel (MWJS).
Flannery said the company is “excited to strengthen GE’s roots in Chicago, where we will continue to focus on being the leading provider of outcome-based solutions for the health care industry. Chicago has a rich industrial heritage, terrific international transportation links and is close to some of the world’s leading healthcare and academic institutions. It is also ideally located for many of GE Healthcare’s operations.”
Bringing the business closer to GE Healthcare’s single largest customer market, said Flannery, was also a strong motivating factor. The Chicago Tribune reported that 60 percent of GE Healthcare’s business is overseas, but the U.S. is still its largest market for digital imaging, information technology, and life sciences business.
Benjamin Fox, GE spokesman, told the MWJS that the corporate move also will bring headquarters closer to GE Healthcare’s key manufacturing centers in Wisconsin and Northern Illinois.
“Wisconsin will also remain a hub for global manufacturing and leadership, and now be much closer geographically than before to the global CEO and headquarters,” said Fox in an e-mail.
According to the Chicago Tribune, Chicago has not offered any tax incentives to encourage GE to move. The Tribune reported that GE technically got its start in Chicago when it was originally founded as a small X-ray business, Victor Electric, in the late nineteenth century.
In a separate announcement, Immelt said that GE headquarters would be moving from Connecticut to Boston, hoping the new city would position them closer to the “center of an ecosystem that shares our aspirations,” reported the Chicago Tribune.
“Greater Boston is home to 55 colleges and universities. Massachusetts spends more on research and development than any other region in the world,” said Immelt. “Boston attracts a diverse, technologically fluent workforce focused on solving challenges for the world.”
Last May, Philips moved its R&D hub to Boston, signing a five year, $25 million research alliance with MIT. Philips CEO Frans van Houten said the move signaled a new era in which research and industry worked more closely together.