General Electric Co. is selling its appliance business to Haier Group of China, but a Filipino executive says GE will remain an important part of the Philippine economy, where the US brand serves a lot of industries.
A Harvard-educated lawyer, who once headed the policy and planning division of the Department of Energy, now takes charge of the Philippine unit of GE, a US conglomerate that built the first street lights in Manila more than a century ago.
Jose Victor Emmanuel De Dios, or simply Jocot, wants to continue the legacy of GE Philippines, by illuminating Filipino homes, buildings, roads and parks with energy-efficient LED, the acronym for light emitting diode that can do much more than providing lights. Lighting is not a part of the appliance business that GE is selling to Haier for $5.4 billion.
“It is always good to work for a company that really provides solutions, that can help the country’s economy and improve people’s lives,” Jocot says in an interview at Shangri La at The Fort Manila in Taguig City, which is just across the street from GE Philippines headquarters.
Jocot was in Perth, Australia in January 2012, overseeing an oil and gas exploration company when he received a call from someone who offered him a job to lead an energy-related company. One who enjoys challenges, he said yes and moved his wife Mariann and four children back to Manila to become the chief executive of GE Philippines. Jocot was born and raised in Navotas in the northern part of Metro Manila.
“I got a call and the person on the other line said are you interested to come back to the Philippines? It was an energy-type company, so I said why not. That company turned out to be GE, which is not only into energy, but also into vast array of businesses including aviation, healthcare, transportation, oil and gas. That appealed to me,” he says.
GE, one of the world’s largest industrial companies worth around $130 billion and ranked No. 6 in terms of global brands, has presence in 170 countries. “It was a great transition for me. Our history is over 100 years. Our predecessor, Thomson-Houston Company, lit the first electric lights in Manila at the turn of the [20th] century,” he says. The Philippines is currently the largest market for GE’s industrial solutions in Southeast Asia, according to Jocot.
GE itself is in a transformation stage, as it sold a significant stake in media company NBC Universal and is exiting most of its financial services platforms, apart from selling its appliance business. It is also taking a leading market position in the digital wave that is beginning to reshape the industrial world.
GE aims to become one of the 10 largest software companies, with the belief that by 2020, around 10,000 gas turbines, 68,000 jet engines, more than 100 million lightbulbs and 152 million cars will be connected to the Internet. GE actually manufactured computers in the 1960s and competed with IBM.
Jocot, 51, has been leading GE Philippines for four years now. He got the job, because of his wide range of skills and experience, having obtained Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of the Philippines and Bachelor of Laws from Ateneo School of Law. He also holds a Master of Laws degree from Harvard Law School.
He worked for Romulo Law Office, where he handled capital markets transactions, mergers and acquisitions, venture capital deals and energy advisory. It was also at the Romulo Law Office, where he was exposed to energy policy, which proved helpful when he was assigned as undersecretary of the Department of Energy when he was just 36 years old, joining former Energy Secretary Vicente Perez.
He became the chairman of Philippine National Oil Co.- Exploration Corp., the oil and gas unit of PNOC. After his government stint, he did some energy consultancy, which would later open for him a high-profile job at an Australian company exploring oil and gas in the Philippines.
In February 2008, he was assigned in Australia as managing director and chief executive of Nido Petroleum Ltd., a publicly listed oil and gas exploration and production company, which is a part of the consortium operating the Galoc oilfield northwest off Palawan.
“I ran policy for the Energy Department. I ran a small oil and gas company so I understand how to run a business. I also practised commercial law,” he says, recalling his experience in the energy sector.
Joining GE Philippines, however, has exposed Jocot to other major industries, with significant contribution to the economy.
General Electric Co., one of the world’s largest conglomerates, traces its roots to Thomson-Houston Electric Company and Edison General Electric Company, the one established by incandescent lamp inventor Thomas Alva Edison in the 1870s.
Thomson-Houston Electric Company installed the first electric street lights on Real Street in Manila in 1890, which makes GE Philippines one of the oldest companies in the country.
GE became known in the Philippines as a leading brand for lightbulbs, stoves, refrigerators and air-conditioners, but Jocot says the company provides more products and services than what consumers know.
GE manufactures big engines, machines and solutions for the aviation, transportation, oil and gas, water, power, renewable energy, healthcare and industrial sectors. “It is just the lightbulb that you buy, you can touch, but at the end of the day, our turbines are also for consumers. If you fly an airplane, chances are it uses a GE engine. If you read your power meter, that is most likely a GE meter. Those who ride the PNR train, chances are it is a GE locomotive,” says Jocot.
As chief executive of GE Philippines, Jocot is tasked to drive the company forward and spread the GE brand in the country. He also leads GE Lighting Philippines Inc. and GE Philippines Meter and Instrument Co. Inc., which has a manufacturing facility in Taguig City that produces smart meters for utilities and exports to Japan.
Jocot says GE is now a digital industrial company. The US conglomerate has recently announced major deals, including the acquisition of the energy business of French conglomerate Alstom and the sale of the GE appliance business to Haier.
It was the GE appliance business that Filipinos were mostly aware of, and ownership of GE appliances somehow became a benchmark or status symbol in the past. “In fact, I get emails from people saying they still have stove or oven, which was purchased in the 1960s and are still working and hospitals were saying they still have x-ray machines acquired years ago, but are still well preserved. GE is really synonymous to quality,” says Jocot.
Jocot is the first Filipino chief executive of GE assigned to focus on the Philippine market. “I guess, the GE leadership realized that there is a lot of opportunities in emerging economies like the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and Myanmar and saw the need for someone who can get the deals done and get the pulse of the public. I belong to a global growth organization that is responsible for delivering growth outside the United States,” he says.
John Rice, the vice chairman and chief executive for global growth organization of GE, visited Manila twice last year, a proof that the conglomerate considers the Philippines a growing market.
Jocot says GE affects Filipino consumers more than they know. “We are present in all businesses—from aviation where we supply aircraft engines to carriers that operate in the Philippines, to power and water where we supply gas and steam turbines, power plants, water solutions, both chemical and equipment, to energy connections, which is energy equipment and industrial solutions business.”
GE also manufactures uninterrupted power supply or UPS devices, transformers, power substations, train locomotives, medical equipment and lighting solutions. The company still maintains the old diesel locomotives used by Philippine National Railways.
“Now as a digital industrial company, I think people should realize that every time they fly anywhere outside Metro Manila, whether in the Philippines or in the region, one out of five flights is powered by GE engines. You go to a hospital and you have an MRI [magnetic resonance imaging] or CT [computed tomography] scan, if you take a closer look, chances are it is a GE machine. People just have to be conscious of that,” he says.
“People don’t get to visit power plants. But we have good power plants, efficient power plants that we bring to the table,” he says.
Jocot says GE, being a digital industrial company, also has a large team of information technology professionals who automate processes and link the machines to the digital space.
“Digital industrial company is really the intersection of an industrial corporation that makes industrial machines and industrial solutions to solve the world’s toughest problems and that of the digital economy. As you have seen, the digitization of the economy is transforming the way we do business,” he says.
“Practically speaking, it is where machines talk to each other and talk to people. From that intersection, the data generated from that vast intersection of industrial machines and digital economy, we are able to make more efficient machines, do preventive maintenance even before machine breaks down,” he says.
“For lighting for example, street lights will have sensors that will take data that will tell us how traffic is. Even in healthcare, we have a cloud-based application where data from machines like MRI or CT scan can be uploaded and read by an expert or radiologist who is not necessarily on the site and compare it to multiple other examples. It is that combination,” he says.
GE established its digital headquarters in San Francisco in 2015 and developed the first cloud-based operating system dedicated exclusively for industrial solutions.
“We are an industrial company because we build stuff like aircraft engine, we build drilling equipment, we build turbines and yet we have a lot of software that goes into the hardware that we build. We actually are aiming to have around 20,000 software professionals around the world as we push ourselves into being a digital industrial company,” he says.
Jocot, who manages 140 employees in the Philippines, says he works with the best people in the industry. “If you work with good people, then your learning curve is not difficult. My mantra has always been you have to be surrounded by people who are better than you,” he says.
Jocot, who enjoys running, cooking and fishing at leisure, describes his job as exciting “because there are so many businesses that we are into.”
“You get to learn something new every day. There are a lot of exciting things I learn. I meet different customers, private sector, government sector, a lot of smart people for a lot of challenges.”
Jocot says GE has also been a part of Philippine history, starting with the installation of street lamps more than a century ago. “I would says that over the course of our history, it [GE contribution] has been significant because our solutions helped people. We are a global leader in different industries,” he says.
He says the company expects to sustain its growth in the country in the years to come. “I think the business is growing. We are paying attention to obvious sectors such as power, which has a lot of opportunities,” he says. “We see a lot of opportunities in healthcare because as the middle class becomes affluent and the sin taxes contribute to national healthcare, people are paying attention to healthcare and healthcare expenditure is increasing,” he says.
“We would like to see more opportunities in the transportation sector, particularly rail. Aviation is growing. With lower oil prices, carriers are turning in profit and increasing passengers,” he says.
Jocot says as the Philippines becomes more of a digital economy, GE will be active to tap opportunities. “Digital industrial is the wave of the future and we want to be able to leverage technologies to other businesses. We are known for a lot of training, improving ourselves. As we learn from our customers, we would like our customers to learn from us,” he says.
Jocot does not mention a growth target for the GE business in the country, but he says the benchmark is a multiple of GDP growth. “What that multiple is, we are trying to assess how the economy is growing,” he says. The Philippines’ gross domestic product grew by an average of 5.1 percent annually between 2001 and 2015, one of the fastest in Southeast Asia. The government’s target is to achieve a growth of at least 7 percent over the medium term.
Jocot says his goal is to sustain the company’s growth trajectory in the Philippines and firm up its digital industrial profile, making “GE top of mind when it comes to industrial solutions.”
“I am very excited for prospects here. Even though I have been with the company for four years, there are still a lot of opportunities,” he says.
