GE Appliances highlights growth as it marks 70 years in Louisville

Jun 21, 2023

Digital Reporter

The 750-acre GE Appliance campus in southeast Louisville known as Appliance Park now employs nearly 8,500 people.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — In 2016, when Chinese appliance maker Haier emerged as the buyer for Louisville-based GE Appliances, the then-CEO of the storied American business predicted it would "thrive," as its new foreign owner was eager to invest in new products and manufacturing capacity.

Chip Blankenship ended up leaving his job as GE Appliances CEO the following year. Nonetheless, his prediction seems to have panned out seven years later.

The 750-acre GE Appliance campus in southeast Louisville known as Appliance Park now employs nearly 8,500 people, up from about 6,000 when Haier purchased the business for $5.4 billion in 2016.

Most of the growth — 2,200 of the 2,500 increase — represents hourly workers such as operators at Appliance Park factories producing washer-dryers, dishwashers and refrigerators.

"We have continued to reinvest in new products, and all of those new products, regardless of the product lines, have gotten us growth in the marketplace, so that reinvestment has led to jobs," said Peter Pepe, who oversees laundry products as GE Appliances’ vice president of clothes care, in an interview Monday.

GE Appliances — which maintains the "GE" brand under a 40-year licensing agreement with General Electric Co. — is marking 70 years since its first product, a dryer, rolled off the assembly line in Louisville in 1953.

The company showed off a production line Monday in the Appliance Park factory known as AP 1, where all GE Appliance laundry machines are manufactured.

GE Appliances brought the dryer production to Louisville in 2019, moving the work from the Mexican appliance manufacturer in which GE Appliances has a stake.

The tour was about four years too late, as the dryer production line started only months before COVID-19 pandemic.

As an example of new products the company has conceived recently, Pepe, the laundry executive, pointed to the GE Profile top-loading washing machine that uses Amazon's voice assistant Alexa as an aide. (You don't have to know how to remove grass stains from jeans — just ask Alexa to set the machine for that, he said.)

"That was a whole new platform that didn't exist four years ago. We put in a whole new line to create that new platform. It was not an iteration of anything beforehand," he said.

At the same time, the appliance market is slowing as higher interest rates ripple through the economy. Pepe said the industry was "negative" in the first quarter of 2023.

"People are being a little more cautious," he said. "Our job is to find ways to be more effective. How do we get those costs out? How do we continue to deliver so we can still have products when people want to buy them? It's been challenging but that's part of what our teams are up to do."

Reach reporter Chris Otts at 502-585-0822, [email protected], on Twitter or on Facebook. Copyright 2023. WDRB Media. All rights reserved.

Digital Reporter

Chris Otts reports for WDRB.com about business and economic topics. He rejoined WDRB News in 2022 after participating in the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Business and Economic Journalism at Columbia University.

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