Despite the global economic slowdown, GE Healthcare Korea, the local biotechnology and health care devices unit of conglomerate General Electric, remains upbeat about its business prospects thanks to the booming biotech and pharma sectors.

“Korea’s demand in health care is pretty strong with its rapidly aging population. By 2030, 25 percent of the population will be over 65 years old,” said Sia Moussavi, president and chief executive of GE Healthcare Korea, in an interview with The Korea Herald.

Moussavi, who took office in 2014, said that the aging society opens a new era in health care for diagnosis and treatment of various illnesses including cancer, dementia, other neurodegenerative diseases and chronic diseases. And Korea is among the OECD’s top five in terms of health care management.

“That creates opportunities for us,” Moussavi said, noting that the Korean government and conglomerates’ zeal to nurture bioscience and biosimilar sectors is also a boon for the company that provides training, solutions as well as other services to health care companies and hospitals.

Within a year, GE Healthcare Korea has seen the number of medical staff undergoing training triple in 2015 in Korea. It has also received rave reviews about the company’s quality from its customers which range from large hospitals to companies such as Samsung, Celltrion and LG Life Science.

This year will be a milestone for the company, with the GE headquarters pushing for transformation from a hardware company to a digital leader. Korea, one of the most wired countries in the world with ever-evolving information technology, is a perfect fit for this.

The GE Store is the cross-border R&D program where all affiliates can freely access each other’s assets, apply new ideas, technologies and approaches. For instance, ultrasound technology has been adapted to scanning and examining GE Energy’s oil pipelines.

The GE Cloud, particularly for GE Healthcare, is the cloud computing system that is “able to sort terabytes of raw data from a CT scanner -- the primary tool for probing the brain of suspected stroke victims -- into a full picture of the brain in around 5 minutes, processing thousands of images in a single data set,” while a “typical computer takes six hours.”

The programs have already garnered local clients, including Hyundai Construction and Engineering, which is seeking to develop health care solutions overseas. “When building hospitals there are a lot of things to consider, from energy power generation, health care, planning, financing ... and I think the two of us will be able to collaborate more in the future,” Moussavi said.

Such new digitization ideas are now being coupled with a new managerial psyche, the “GE Beliefs.” The bottom up decision making process – which means it is partially ditching its famous matrix system -- is expected to put the 123-year old company onto the list of millennial “fast companies” such as Google or Facebook, moving the company away from being just a hardware company once famous for rolling out lightbulbs.

“Before we had company values that was top-down, company-employee-performance structure. But the GE Beliefs is the employee beliefs allowing employee-company-performance order. This will bring creativity, allow staff to make decisions in front of the customers and create flexible solutions,” Moussavi said, showing high hopes for the company.

“And through the changes we wish to communicate more and bring more to the local business scene,” he added.

By Bae Ji-sook (baejisook@heraldcorp.com)