For General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, execution, service, and customer experience are critical to success.
During the company’s Jan. 22 fiscal fourth-quarter conference call, Immelt talked about these themes.
“Overall, the team executed in a tough environment in the quarter, organic growth was down slightly and for the year organic growth was up 3% with seven of eight segments growing,” Immelt said, according to Seeking Alpha. “Service remains steady, up 5% in the year and 4% in the quarter organically. Looking at revenue in 2016, let me just give you a few metrics and some things to think about. We primarily ship from backlog so orders and backlog growth matter. In 2015, six to seven businesses grew 
backlog, some substantially. When we do our analytics around convertible backlog and business performance, we see a path to 2% to 4% organic growth for 2016, even with a very difficult oil and gas market.”
Immelt was very keen about General Electric’s service.
“The most robust part of our business is service,” he explained. “Service backlog grew by 16% in 2015 and we expect another year of 20% plus growth in our digital applications. Both of these support sustained growth in services. We had another strong quarter and year-end margins, for the year our industrial margins were up 80 basis points at the segment level and 110 basis points overall. Services were up 40 basis points and equipment was up 20 basis points. We continue to make good progress on value gap up more than $450 million on the year in cost-productivity.”
Orders grew by 3%, which was represented a 1% organic rise.
“Services grew by 5%, which was up 3% organically, and equipment grew by 2%, which was down slightly organically,” Immelt added. “Service orders were strong. Our power gen service orders grew by 13%. Health care service orders were up 3% and Alstom orders were $2.6 billion. We had some nice wins with Alstom in China on the hydro business several combined cycle gas turbine power plants with richer GE content, and the Hinkley Point Nuclear Steam turbine in the United Kingdom.”