This general meeting was different: Instead of group figures, the focus was on climate protests against Siemens. However, company boss Joe Kaeser has rejected criticism of his company’s involvement in a mine project – and warned of excessive demands on companies to take responsibility for the climate.
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“Would we support the construction of a coal mine again today? No,” said Kaeser at the general meeting in Munich. However, it is questionable whether one can also hold companies accountable for supplying a controversial company with uncritical goods. Kaeser cited modern building technology for the headquarters of the mining group Rio Tinto as an example, which reduces CO2 emissions there. “If someone comes back and ropes to the Siemens main building and says: You shouldn’t do that?”
Kaeser alluded to an action by Greenpeace activists who had occupied the roof of the Siemens headquarters in Munich for hours on Tuesday. The group is criticized by climate protectionists for supplying signaling equipment for a railway line for 18 million euros that is used to transport coal from a new, huge mine in Australia to a port. The Indian Adani Group wants to fire power plants with the fossil fuel.
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“We did not correctly assess the scope,” admitted Kaeser at the general meeting. Siemens is only involved in the second derivation “and the delivery is irrelevant to the mine. Kaeser’s contract as chairman of the board expires at the end of the year. So it will probably be his last general meeting at the top of Siemens. He is currently the focus of criticism from coalition opponents and Artists – and acts hopelessly tangled.
New orders are down two percent
Left-wing boss Bernd Riexinger, however, has a clear idea of how far corporate responsibility for the climate has to go. He demanded that Siemens be excluded from government contracts in Germany. “At the political level, corporations must be held responsible for climate-damaging corporate policies abroad,” said Riexinger of the “Augsburger Allgemeine”. “One starting point can be to exclude groups that earn money from climate-damaging projects abroad from government contracts.” Among other things, Siemens builds the ICE for the state-owned Deutsche Bahn group.
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From a purely economic point of view, the new financial year began for Siemens “somewhat cautiously”, as Kaeser conceded before the shareholders’ meeting in the Munich Olympiahalle. Revenue in the first quarter of the fiscal year, between October 1 and December 31, increased slightly by one percent to EUR 20.3 billion, and the net profit of EUR 1.1 billion was slightly above the previous year’s level.
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New orders fell two percent to EUR 24.8 billion. Among other things, this was due to the continuing weakness of the auto industry and mechanical engineering, two important customer groups for Siemens. However, the group still has many orders from previous quarters to be processed, so that the order backlog has reached a record level of 149 billion euros.
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Kaeser sees the greatest need for entrepreneurial action in the energy business. The wind energy subsidiary Siemens Gamesa posted red figures in the first quarter. Siemens announced on Tuesday that it would take over the shares of the minority shareholder Iberdrola, with whom there had been repeated disputes in the past. Kaeser now hopes that “the management will have more capacity to take a closer look at the improvement in profitability”.
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