By Nat Rudarakanchana - Don’t fear if your oil rig falters – there’s an app to help you out, according to the conglomerate General Electric Company NYSE:GE.
“In our Oil & Gas business, customers feel pain when a drill rig goes down and stays out of service,” wrote General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday. “So we created an app called Rig Down.”
That application helps General Electric communicate with corporate customers and estimate probable response times. It also recalls a list of all the industrial components sold by GE for those rigs.
“The app enables operators to alert the entire GE drilling team if there is a rig down situation,” wrote General Electric spokesman Seth Martin to IBTimes. Average rig outage times caused by blowout preventer problems have fallen over 80 percent thanks to the app, he added.
General Electric makes millions of dollars on lucrative multi-year service contracts whereby the company maintains its industrial equipment, typically sold to corporations and governments. The company sells oil and gas infrastructure, locomotives, mining equipment, and wind and gas turbines, among other items.
The company’s oil and gas business is one of its fastest growing units, becoming a $20 billion business by 2013, partly thanks to several acquisitions. Analysts are bullish on the unit’s prospects, partly thanks to its development of subsea processing technology.
Immelt’s post also lauded General Electric for simplifying its corporate operations and culture. The diversified $257 billion giant will spin off part of its consumer finance business in 2014. Some analysts expect that it could sell off its consumer brands, including its consumer appliances business, in coming years.
General Electric has tried to stick closely to its industrial businesses, where it can leverage its global scale, in recent years. The company has slimmed down non-industrial businesses, like its finance arm GE Capital.
In the meantime, many investors have lost interest in the company's stock, said Barclays PLC LON:BARC in a Monday report, citing far less interest from its clients over the past decade.