Comment: The Siemens boss remains vague about the renovation - but he has a clear vision in mind

During the Nvidia tour through Europe, many large companies paid court to Jensen Huang. The head of the US chip company is currently the undisputed superstar in the tech industry. Nvidia is worth significantly more on the stock market than the German DAX 40 companies combined.

One of the few companies that can meet Nvidia on an equal footing is Siemens. Not in terms of market capitalization, but Siemens has so far played a leading role in industrial AI globally because it has deep digital and physical roots in factories around the world. Without Siemens, the path into the industrial metaverse is difficult, even for Nvidia.

With his “One Tech Company” program, Siemens boss Roland Busch wants to make the company more powerful and even more irreplaceable in the future. The delicate conversion in the middle of ongoing operations has so far gone without any major friction. It helps that Siemens is operating from a position of strength because business is doing extremely well. The mood at the management meeting this week was good.

And yet Busch needs to explain his “One Tech Company” vision better internally. The new organizational charts are now in place for now. However, many things are still unclear both internally and externally, even two years after the term “One Tech Company” was first introduced internally by Busch at SBC 2024.

Because everyone knows that there are likely to be further changes to the structure; so far it has hardly become any less complex. Busch also needs to better explain how the “One Tech Company” program is specifically intended to improve business and what growth goals can be achieved with it.

In short: Busch has only partially painted the big picture so far. In the past two years, expectations have been high before balance sheet presentations, capital market days and management meetings. But the picture remained vague and formed in small steps. The integrated technology group he has in mind will be his legacy when he relinquishes his chairmanship in 2030.

However, the unusually long period of uncertainty also has understandable reasons. Busch's leadership consciously decided not to announce a finished program from above and then enforce it downwards. Structure and strategy are developed in teams in an orderly process - perhaps even in the management no one knows exactly what the group will look like in two or three years.

In disruptive times - artificial intelligence has accelerated the pace of change even further - transformation is never complete anyway, but rather a permanent process. Only if this succeeds can Siemens remain among the top tech companies - and perhaps catch up at least a little with the great role model Nvidia in terms of market value.