MUMBAI: The German engineering and technology major Siemens said its 157-year-old operations in India will become the third or fourth-largest revenue head for the group in the next three years, overtaking Germany and France.
Currently, India is the fifth largest revenue contributor for the group chipping in around 4 per cent of the group topline, but is the fastest growing.
Currently, the US leads its revenue front followed by China, Germany and France, placing India the fifth largest, Peter Koerte, the member of the managing board and chief technology officer & chief strategy officer at Siemens AG, told a select group of editors here on the sidelines of their ‘innovation day.
Sunil Mathur, the managing director and chief executive at Siemens India, chipped in saying, last year, operations in India contributed close to 4 per cent of the group’s global revenue of a little over $83 billion or Rs 17,701 crore.
The company here employs 32,000 of its 2.4 lakh total employee count globally, across its 32 plants. Of the total employees, 10,000 are in the software divisions in Pune and Bengaluru, Mathur added.
When asked about the annual R&D spend, Koerte told TNIE that the company sets aside at least 6-8 per cent of its annual revenue which works out to be around $2 billion per year for innovations. But he refused to share their annual patent accretion or those from India saying when it comes to R&D it’s one single global platform and we don’t differentiate it by geography.
To another question, Koerte admitted that their plans for participating in the once-much touted smart cities project have not come up to what was planned and had to accordingly tweak their plans.
When asked about where India operations figure in terms of resource and finance allocation, both Koerte and Mathur said, “this our fastest growing market and money was never a problem for us nor will be a problem for us. Given the diversity of this market, our difficulty is in fact meeting the time to market, which involves a lot of tweaking the original product, and not having the money to develop a new product for this market.”
On the spin-off of Siemens Power into a separate entity, they said, this will give added focus to the operations and is also a global plan. The demerger is awaiting regulatory approvals.
Last month Siemens said it would spin off its energy business to a wholly-owned subsidiary. The company plans to transfer the business to Siemens Energy India, which will be a wholly-owned subsidiary incorporated in February 2024.
Koerte said industrial metaverse technologies will significantly enhance productivity, energy efficiency, operational performance, quality and flexibility across companies and the Siemens Xcelerator programme, which is the open digital business platform, has around 1,000 offerings from over 400 sellers globally, including over 200 from India.