If there is light at the end of the tunnel, it is not a Siemens bulb. The Osram lighting business is suffering along with the rest of Siemens’ industrial businesses. Indeed, the glimmer is more likely to be one of Siemens’ high-speed trains, one of a small number of its businesses, including healthcare, that do not sit at the foot of a high mountain, as Peter L?scher, the boss of Siemens, put it.
The German company is having a torrid time and not just because it is being pursued by claims from prosecutorial authorities worldwide over past bribery scandals. It has now settled matters with Heinrich Von Pierer, its former chairman, who is barred from Siemens premises, but these are trifles compared with the threat of European and North American deindustrialisation.
For a company such as Siemens to prosper it needs a thriving manufacturing sector but the German company only sees such an outlook far overseas. “Our hopes rest primarily on Asia and the emerging economies,” Mr L?scher said.
We are used to such comments from business leaders but with Siemens it is poignant and a dire warning. Without a healthy manufacuring sector in Europe and North America, companies such as Siemens, GE and Philips, all of which are big employers in Britain, face a grim outlook, fighting tooth and nail for the same contracts in China. Mr L?scher yesterday hailed green energy technology, which he said could lead to “reindustrialisation” in some countries and Siemens is betting on its capabilities in wind turbines and in smart electricity grids where it hopes to do business in Britain. These are good ideas but they are still fragile emerging businesses that require heavy subsidy. They are not the bedrock of a private company. Siemens is a business that sells to manufacturers and few in Britain really understand how dangerous is the situation that we are in today.
“We have a long way to climb,” Mr L?scher said and it would be a foolish person who did not recognise that the “we” refers to many more companies and businesses than Siemens.