ZURICH (Reuters) – Siemens has completed its reorganisation, Chief Executive Roland Busch has told Manager Magazin, with the recently appointed executive favouring smaller acquisitions to expand the German engineering and technology company.
“We have already completed our spin-offs,” said Busch, who took over as CEO from longstanding boss Joe Kaeser in February. “Additional value is not created by further portfolio changes.
“A company’s portfolio should be reasonably coherent, that means it has a connection and does not diverge too much in terms of growth and margin. That’s why we spun off Energy – coal and gas-fired power plants have limited growth opportunities and are technologically quite far away.”
Siemens did not lack ideas, money or courage to make big acquisitions, Busch said, although he thought smaller deals had more potential.
The company has recently completed the $700 million acquisition of electrical component marketplace Supplyframe, and spent 100 million euros on five smaller software companies, he said in the interview published on Thursday.
“Smaller complementary acquisitions take us further. We generate new functionalities and additional volume with them, and they are easier to integrate,” Busch said.
Siemens’s core portfolio of software for digital product development, manufacturing and manufacturing logistics and for designing electronics already had a strong base, with 5.3 billion euros in annual sales, he added.
“There are only a few players left here, the market is close to final consolidation,” he said.
(Reporting by John Revill; Editing by Anil D’Silva)
