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Siemens AG is the world’s largest electronics company and a European corporate heavyweight. The company founded in 1847 by Werner von Siemens in Berlin has become a global behemoth with a global revenue of $110.82 billion in 2008, employing almost half a million people in about 190 countries. It has been pioneering new technologies ranging from telecommunications, transport, power plants, computer technology and water treatment. However, in the last quarter of the past century, Siemens was considered a “bank with an associated work bench”, earning a fortune by virtually controlling the German telecommunications market together with the formerly state-owned German Telecom. Unavoidably, this had hurt  the innovative potential for a long time and the company’s workforce appeared to be busy dealing with interior problems , resulting in a lack of  product innovation.

In recent years, the company was overwhelmed dealing with its bribery scandal. Siemens was investigated for years, paid hundreds of millions of dollars to the NYC-based law firm Debevoise & Plimpton to screen the company’s financial transactions and paid a record fine of $1.34 billion to settle the case in December 2008.

Despite the distractions caused by the bribery case, Siemens has successfully gone through a fundamental restructuring process. In recent years, the company split off unprofitable units like the mobile phone unit which was sold to the Taiwanese company BenQ in 2005. Siemens faced harsh criticism after splitting off Siemens Mobile and cutting a large number of jobs.

However, the company is now well-positioned for the future. It has focused on three major sectors now: Industry, Energy and Healthcare. Each of these, especially Energy and Healthcare have a promising future. Siemens provides comprehensive renewable energy solutions which will very likely pay back once the energy technology boom begins and significantly transforms the way we use energy.

This is an interesting video about the company’s answers to today’s energy challenge, featuring Nobel Price winner Joseph E. Stiglitz amongst others. (from Siemens’ YouTube page)

This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 5:02 PM and is filed under Energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.