The Motley Fool's industrial analyst, Isaac Pino, recently attended The Atlantic magazine's Manufacturing Summit for insight into the industry and visited General Electric's (GE 0.68%) 30 Rockefeller offices for a closer look at the $250 billion conglomerate. Isaac and Motley Fool Money host Chris Hill weigh in on the company's transformation over the past few years, its game-changing investments in 3-D printing and the industrial Internet, and the opportunity ahead for GE shareholders.
In the following segment, Isaac takes a closer look at the opportunities for a company like GE to return manufacturing operations to the United States. As a case study, GE's Appliance Park facility in Kentucky employed 23,000 workers in 1973, but that figure dwindled to only 1,863 in 2011. However, the Appliance Park story is a long way from over, and the facility is in the midst of a revival that bodes well for manufacturing hubs across the country. Just last March, Jeffrey Immelt asserted in the Harvard Business Review that outsourcing is "quickly becoming mostly outdated as a business model for GE Appliances." Isaac and Chris discuss the drivers behind this "insourcing boom" and why this is a trend that won't go away.
