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Siemens to focus on sustainability

Technews Industry Guide: Sustainable Manufacturing 2021 News

As part of its recent virtual capital market day, entitled ‘Accelerating High Value Growth’, Siemens presented its new growth strategy that includes a comprehensive sustainability agenda.

“Our customers benefit from our ability to combine the real and digital worlds,” said Roland Busch, CEO of Siemens. “Digitalisation, automation and sustainability are growth engines for our business. Here, our core business and our digital business reinforce each other in a virtuous cycle. This effect forms the foundation of our growth strategy, and we are now making our commitment to sustainability clearer than ever. Thus, in times of major global challenges, we are creating clear added value for our customers, our stakeholders and society.”

Focus on digital transformation as a key challenge

Following the spin-off of Siemens Energy in 2020, today’s Siemens is a focused technology company that is addressing industry, infrastructure, transportation and healthcare. As a result, the company is active in sectors that form the backbone of the global economy and offer great potential for digital transformation and enhanced sustainability – the major challenges of our time.

Innovative technologies in use across the entire company

Siemens’ unique ability to combine the real and digital worlds is based on three elements. Using its experts’ profound domain knowhow, it is developing digital applications for specific industries. In addition, it is pooling expertise to drive the core technologies that are used across the company. And finally, thanks to a strong ecosystem including customers, partners and start-ups, Siemens plans to outpace competitors in bringing customer-oriented innovations to market.

To accomplish this, the company is rapidly driving its technology portfolio: software and automation solutions and a leading IoT platform, plus core technologies in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), digital twins, 5G, industrial edge and cybersecurity. Since Siemens’ core business and its digital business will increasingly reinforce each other in the future, the company expects to see profitable growth above the market average.

DEGREE – clear commitment to sustainability with ambitious targets

Siemens is underscoring its commitment to sustainability with its new framework called DEGREE, which stands for decarbonisation, ethics, governance, resource efficiency, equity and employability.

The company is backing its ambitions in sustainability with systematised, measurable and specific long-term targets for environmental, social and governance (ESG) dimensions. In addition, it is officially adopting the topic of sustainability as an additional strategic imperative for its investment decisions.

Leveraging its technology portfolio, Siemens can support the public and private sectors in the digital transformation of industrial operations, building and grid infrastructure, transportation and healthcare, while offering innovative solutions with a compelling business case to drive the transition to a carbon-neutral economy. These technologies help customers achieve their goals while using fewer resources.

In 2015, Siemens became one of the first industrial companies worldwide to commit to achieving carbon neutrality in its own business operations by 2030. The company has since cut its CO2 emissions by more than half. In the meantime, Siemens has been intensifying its existing activities for physical decarbonisation throughout its entire value chain and is pursuing the data-driven reduction pathway that the Science-Based Targets initiative advocates. This approach ensures that the company’s climate-protection efforts are in harmony with the Paris Agreement’s highest aspiration levels. In its supply chain, Siemens is committing itself to reducing emissions by 20% by 2030, and the company aims to achieve a carbon-neutral supply chain by 2050. By the end of this decade, Siemens also intends to make even greater progress toward achieving circularity and, for example, clearly increasing the purchase of secondary materials for metals and resins.

DEGREE includes numerous other targets – for example, for safeguarding the long-term employability of the people who work for the company and for fostering inclusion, respect and equal treatment. The company is pursuing its declared goal of ensuring that women account for 30% of the people at the top management level by 2025. At the same time, Siemens will continue to invest in education and training for all its employees. Worldwide, the company already spends about 250 million Euros a year on such measures.


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