The recent APEC conference in Bali was also a discussion forum among the 1,200 global CEOs who attended the event. The main theme throughout the two-day summit was inclusive sustainable growth and the global economic outlook, which covered sub-topics such as new opportunities for growth, reshaping priorities, evaluating strategies and the business of innovation. Stuart Dean, COE of Global Electronics (GE) ASEAN, shared his views with Tempo on the summit's agenda.

What does equitable growth mean to GE?

One of the things that we've seen over the last twenty years is how important infrastructure is to helping raise the living standards of everyone in these fast-growing economies like Indonesia. So one way we can help is by helping build infrastructure and improve people's lives that way. But you also have a responsibility to create jobs. So we're localizing where it makes sense in the bigger markets like Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, where they're building a lot of infrastructure. So that's another contribution to equitable growth. We're also working a lot on renewable technologies.

Give me a few examples of the renewable technologies.

It's early days yet but 25 to 30 percent of people are not connected to electricity and they tend to be on remote islands where it's not easy to build a grid, typically if there is electricity it will come from diesel fuel, which still burns inefficiently. Usually there's a lot of wasted biomass that is not used, it's burned. We think that biomass can be burned and turn into highly efficient gas engines to create electricity. So weve got some pilot plants going on in Indonesia, working with PLN, and we hope we can prove the case and be able to grow on it on a large scale basis.

Is this cost-effective?

Against diesel power at 18 cents per kilowatt-hour (Kwh), we think we can come in at 12 cents or maybe less.

Where in Indonesia are the pilot projects?

We're working on one in Sumba, one in Bali and I'm sure there's going to be one in Java. These things have taken longer than we've wanted, but eventually we'll get them up and running. (*)