Splitting Siemens up was a huge experiment. Almost a year after the energy sector went public, the move has proven to be the right one – at least from the point of view of the booming rest of the group.
The fact that Roland Busch can raise the forecast for Siemens again on Thursday is also due to his predecessor Joe Kaeser. Busch will now be responsible for Siemens’ business for three quarters, and since February he has also been nominally at the top of the group.
And every time he presented the figures for one of these quarters, he screwed up the annual forecast for the group – including after the third fiscal quarter, which ended in June.
Business is splendid, profits tripled compared to the same quarter of the previous year, which was burdened by Corona and special effects, to 1.5 billion euros, sales increased by almost a quarter to 16.1 billion, and incoming orders also rose sharply. “We are growing very strongly because we have the right technologies at the right time,” says the CEO. The accelerating digitization is currently playing into Siemens’ cards as well as the recovery of its markets and customers.
And then Busch keeps talking about the “focused technology company” Siemens – and this is where the predecessor Kaeser comes into play. He had split up the industrial conglomerate, brought medical technology and the energy sector to the stock exchange as Siemens Healthineers and Siemens Energy. At the moment she can be called a good and bad daughter. Healthineers is shining – also thanks to the well-selling corona tests – and has raised the forecast three times. Energy is suffering from problems with wind power, is in the red and has already lowered its outlook twice.
But thanks to the spin-off, the problems with the former energy division are no longer fully reflected. It is true that they put some strain on the result of Siemens and Busch emphasizes: “We were not pleased with what happened there,” but it is no longer his immediate problem. He is assuming that the bosses of Energy and its wind power subsidiary Siemens Gamesa will get the problems under control, Busch can say on Thursday, relatively relaxed.
Joe Kaeser is still in the boat as Energy’s supervisory board chairman. On Thursday, he couldn’t help but praise the split on Twitter. He is happy that the strategy is paying off in such a way that it will convince even the last skeptics that it was right to build a new Siemens, he writes. Conviction has already arrived on the stock exchange. Since the Energy spin-off, the remaining Siemens has gained a good 40 percent in value.
Siemens also expects good figures in the current fourth fiscal quarter. Correspondingly, the company is screwing its expectations for the full year upwards: According to the forecast, which has been raised for the third time, Siemens now wants to earn 6.1 to 6.4 billion euros – up to now it was 5.7 to 6.2 billion. Sales should also grow faster again.
The growth in the past quarter was spread across business areas and regions. “China was once again a decisive engine for growth – but so were Europe and the United States,” says Busch. In addition, the group benefited from a strong recovery in its key markets from the automotive, mechanical engineering and electrical industries to infrastructure, data centers and mobility.
However, part of the growth is also due to the fact that customers are currently building up larger inventories for fear of interrupting supply chains. This growth driver could fade in the coming year, as Busch emphasizes.
In the third quarter they “delivered again – with strong and profitable growth in all business areas,” says Busch. Siemens Energy isn’t one of them anymore.
Jane Stock is a technology author, who has written for 24 Hours World. She writes about the latest in technology news and trends, and is always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to improve his audience’s experience.
