Evaluation on GE’s Core Competence

Abstract

General Electric (GE), the only company which is still on the index list since the Dow Jones Industrial Index was established in 1896, is one of the few companies in the world with a fair market capitalization of more than USD 500 billion. The root cause of GE’s success can be found in its powerful core competence. This paper classifies more than one hundred years’ development history of GE into three distinct stages: the era of business diversification, the era of refocusing operation and the era of business globalization with reference to the conceptual model and structural equation model of our research. The core competence scores in each stage are calculated by using analytic hierarchy process for objective comparison and evaluation.

Keywords: GE, core competence, analytic hierarchy process