Thank you very much Jim. And welcome, everyone, to the Siemens Annual Shareholders’ Meeting. This has been a special year for Siemens: record results, a record share price - yes, again! We'll take a closer look at all of that in a moment. But we have something even more significant going on right now: we are changing the fabric of our company. We are changing how we interact with customers, with partners and with each other, changing how we organize ourselves as a company and how we measure and judge success, changing where we focus our resources, and, as a result, changing how we make our case in our markets, gain market share and, indeed, create entirely new markets - not just as a technology company, but as ONE Technology Company, a company with exceptional and unique strengths. “ONE Tech Company.” That is our North Star. That is the course we have charted: for greater customer focus, for faster innovation and for higher growth. You will hear more today about how we - my colleagues and I - are tackling this task. But first, let's take a look at the figures. And they're strong: a profit of €11.4 billion in industrial business - higher than ever before; a profit margin of 15.5% - just as strong as the previous year; profit after tax: €9 billion - a historic high; and free cash flow €9.5 billion - again a very strong figure. And this strong performance is reflected in our share price, which rose by 34% in fiscal year 2024. This morning at 9:15 a.m., our shares were trading at €225, which is a new record high. Siemens is one of the hundred most valuable companies worldwide. And things are really not that easy right now either. Many companies are struggling. China, a very important market for us, is weakening: growth here has leveled off at around 5% per year - ten years ago it was double that. Europe is stagnating and European companies are losing ground to US and Chinese competitors. And the German economy is shrinking. The importance of the US market is consequently increasing all the time. There, and in China and other parts of the world as well, we create substantial value locally, with many colleagues on the ground, with plants in-country and with regional suppliers. And that is to our advantage, because the USA is changing, China is changing, Europe and Germany are changing, the world is changing. Siemens is changing too - and it is also growing, despite the uncertainties, by trying new things, and by developing new technologies and bringing them to market quickly. Let's look at a few more figures from the year ended. All the business indicators I mention today are, of course, on a comparable basis. Our revenue rose by 3% to €75.9 billion, with Smart Infrastructure and Siemens Mobility the main engines of growth. Revenue at these two businesses rose by more than 9%. I would like to highlight Smart Infrastructure in particular: a 17.3% margin - a highly profitable business - and the team has increased this figure year-on-year for 16 quarters in a row. This is a tremendous achievement - and the capital markets have taken note. New orders for Siemens as a whole: €84.1 billion, minus 4%. This is primarily due to automation business. Many customers stocked up on our control systems during the COVID-19 crisis. Demand subsequently dropped temporarily, but is now leveling off again. The order backlog is strong: €113 billion. What does all this mean for you, the owners? A higher dividend. We have increased the dividend by around 50% since 2020 and are proposing an increase of 11% this time around, so €0.50 more, €5.20 per share. Now on to the outlook: we expect revenue growth of 3 to 7% in the current fiscal year, and we expect basic earnings per share of between €10.40 and €11, all of this - as always - before purchase price allocation accounting. The proceeds of the Innomotics sale are not included here. This morning, we presented our figures for the first quarter. It has been a strong start to the new fiscal year for all our businesses. Siemens is growing, and Siemens has the potential to grow even faster. Siemens will move faster as ONE Technology Company. Explaining how we're doing that, how we're developing technology for the entire group, how we're developing products with customers and partners, how we're increasing our hit rate, and how our teams are creating growth is what today is all about. Let's take virtual industrial controls as an example. As you may recall, we looked at this concept and the first pilot applications at our last Annual Shareholders’ Meeting. One year on: Audi is doing it - in production, exactly where it really counts. As a quick reminder, this is what we mean when we talk about virtual industrial controls. The processes in modern factories are controlled by many small devices sited close to the machinery. These Siemens controls are hardware-based. Now a team from Siemens and Audi has virtualized the controls used in the assembly of car bodies at the Böllinger Höfe plant and installed them in a data center eight kilometers away. How exactly this benefits our customer Audi, and how Audi and Siemens made it happen together, we will now find out from my guests: welcome Efrossini and Sven. Efrossini is the head of our industrial controls business. You joined us here two years ago. And Sven, you are the head of Audi's “Edge Cloud 4 Production” project. The controls are now moving to one central facility - from a multitude of small units to one big data center. What does Audi expect to gain from this?
For us it's really a revolution. We see three advantages: we will be more flexible, and faster, and we are paving the way for AI. We will be more flexible by becoming hardware-independent: with Edge Cloud 4 Production, we are essentially building a platform that will enable us to provide software, such as the virtual controls we are talking about today, easily without taking a screwdriver to the control cabinet. And we will be faster. We still have a lot of hardware controls today and they are very time-consuming in the event of faults or IT security updates. In the future, we will be able to deal with these centrally. As for the third aspect, AI: having all the controls on one platform, our platform, would obviously enable us to access the data much more easily to analyze it, see what is happening in the factory and respond and optimize everything. We intend to go live with the first virtual controls in Neckarsulm in the coming weeks. And that is something of which we're really proud. Increasing productivity, being more agile, but also using the power of AI in the future. This will be a world premiere.
How long has it taken you?
It typically takes five to seven years to develop a hardware control. Because we have now decoupled the hardware from the software, we were able to send the first production pilot to Audi after three months and completed the whole development process in two years. We - Siemens - are the first to bring a virtual PLC with a TÜV certificate to market. And we're very proud of that!
Innovating together. You mentioned the TÜV certificate. Why is that so important?
Safety is vital in production. They're machines, robots. It is essential that they stop immediately if anyone comes too close. There are special safety modules attached to the control for this purpose, and we have virtualized them as well. That had never been done before. And everything that has to do with safety, worldwide, must be approved by TÜV.
This is a fantastic achievement. I mentioned a moment ago that we're changing the fabric of the company - how we work with each other at Siemens and also how we co-operate with partners. How did the collaboration go?
For us it went exceptionally well - and quickly! We experimented a lot together: we had a new version every couple of months, which we then tested together at our facilities. We did run into a few obstacles from time to time of course, but we found our way around them. The collaboration with Siemens was close, intensive and fast-moving. We worked together as equal partners and showed each other a great deal of trust, which I believe is the only way a new technological project like this can work. As I said, we intend to go live with the first two systems in the coming weeks and after that we want to roll out virtual controls more widely. Next, a whole line - we are talking around 200 controls - then an entire car body plant, then multiple plants around the world... We really want to scale up our use of virtual controls. We also want to bring other applications onto the platform so that we can make greater use of artificial intelligence in production.
So, more artificial intelligence in production... AI is beginning to gain traction... What comes next for us in this respect?
We have opened the door for AI in production with our virtual controls. I'll give you an example: an AI can evaluate images in real time on the production line to check quality. If it determines that a product is not of sufficient quality, it communicates with the virtual control and the product is removed from the process. That can be done. Although we developed the virtual controls with Audi and for Audi, they are not just for the automotive sector of course. We already have customers today in the pharmaceutical industry, in the food industry and in aerospace. So there's an incredible amount of potential, and we want to scale up.
Great, thank you for making this collaboration work. I wish you both continued success, Audi with its scaling up at the site and then around the world and, of course, us as well as we look to scale up for all industries. Thank you so much. Good luck!
