We are in conversation with a very important guest, Dr. Peter Koerte. He's a member of the managing board, CTO and chief strategy officer of Siemens, and he joins us right now on the show. Well, we call it Siemens, it could be Zehns. Dr. Peter, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you, thank you for having me.
The pleasure is entirely ours. It's an unenviable position to be in, yours, because you are strategizing for a large global conglomerate at a point of time when global certainty is anything but certain. How do you view the world and growth from your perspective?
Absolutely, you're right. It is one of the best jobs you can have because it's all about technology. So Siemens is in the midst of a transformation into a tech powerhouse that brings all the benefits to industry, to infrastructure, and to mobility, trains. And as such, we are working now in an environment that is very, very agile, where you have to revisit your strategy continuously because of geopolitics, because of new technology trends. So every week there's something new, and it's very important to keep to your strategic priorities.
So what are the leading technologies that Siemens is pursuing, and what difference do you think it makes to the world of various verticals that you might be providing the technology to?
Right, so for us, there are two essentially that you're looking at. For one, of course, there's AI, but there's the industrial AI side of things, meaning that we use industrial data in order to improve industrial processes, which really makes factory workers more productive, which makes trains more safe, which makes energy buildings more energy efficient. So we bring productivity, energy efficiency, knowledge to the industrial world. This is what we do. Number one. And number two is we build digital twins. Think of Davos. We can build the digital twin of Davos, but we can also bring the digital world and optimize it. We can see how many people go where, where is energy needed, there's water consumption happening, various inefficiencies that actually tech can help us to spot and then really make it better. And this is exactly what Siemens does every day.
So this must be a large market for a lot of industries in various parts of the world, including India, I did imagine. What are your thoughts on the acceptance of some of the stuff that you're doing in large markets like India, and of course India specifically as well?
Yeah, so generally speaking, the technology has to serve the people, right? So therefore it has to be embedded into the technology. No matter how you operate a train, how you actually work with a machine, how you manipulate the controllers of a building, it needs to be super simple. So therefore user experience is something that we bring so that people more easily adapt the technologies that you bring. For India specifically, it's an enormous opportunity because if you think about the many, many people that are not skilled yet today in the Indian economy, if you think about the 60 million small to medium-sized enterprises you have in India, this is a huge opportunity. So we have to bring very simple technology, easy to deploy, easy to plug and play, into the existing environment and then get Indian factories, Indian buildings that very initial edge that they need.
So I'm guessing some of that work might already be happening in India through you as well, because Siemens has a very large presence in India as we speak. Over the years, talk to us a bit about that market and how do you expand there, if you will.
Sure. Of course, for us India is the key growth market. We have more than 24,000 people in India, two major innovation hubs. Essentially every product today that Siemens is shipping is software enabled, and that software has been most likely touched by Indian engineers that do software development. So pretty much India is going through all the offerings that we have at Siemens. But more importantly, it is a huge growth market. India wants to be, or has the power to become, the third largest economy by 2030, wants to increase the manufacturing share from 15 to 25%. And we say that Siemens needs India for the growth, but India needs Siemens in order to bring the tech that you need to make that leap in productivity and technology.
