What you’ll learn:
- Siemens confirmed the reduction of 6,000 positions companywide would mainly take place in its Digital Industries business unit, based in Plano, Texas.
- CEO Roland Busch anticipated 5,000 job cuts late last year when Siemens reported a minus-46% revenue drop at Digital Industries.
Layoffs and job reductions are news any day of the week, though Siemens AG’s CFO sounded a note of surprise during a March 19 question-and-answer call at the amount of attention that its cutting of 6,000 positions companywide, essentially announced in November, was receiving.
“There was a lot of, honestly speaking, surprisingly to me, a lot of noise yesterday after we just announced numbers to that what we indicated with the same dimension, with the same footprint and everything already last year, in November,” Siemens CFO Ralf Thomas said during the call.
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“At the end of the day, looking at it from a pragmatic point of view, only half … is going to hit the ground in Germany,” he added. “We need to, and have announced several times, at several stages, that we need to follow growth opportunities and not geography and passport holding. So, it cannot have been catching anyone by surprise, from my point of view.”
Siemens confirmed the reduction of 6,000 positions companywide would mainly take place in its Digital Industries business unit, which develops and manufactures industrial automation hardware and software, and offers digitalization technology and services. Siemens put the number of redundancies for Digital Industries at 5,600, or 8% of the total employment for that segment.
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CEO Roland Busch anticipated 5,000 job cuts late last year when Siemens reported a minus-46% revenue drop for the Digital Industries operating unit of the Munich-based company. Its U.S.-based headquarters are located in the Washington, D.C., area. Digital Industries is based in Plano, Texas.
The entire Siemens engineering group has 312,000 employees across all of its businesses, but the industrial automation business has been hampered by prolonged weak demand, especially in Germany and China. "The German market in particular has been in decline for two years. Capacities in Germany must therefore be adjusted," according to a group statement.
In contrast, Siemens recently documented two U.S. expansions worth $5 million for its industrial automation business in the U.S.
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“We believe in the innovation and strength of America’s industry,” Busch stated earlier this month. “That’s why Siemens has invested over $90 billion in the country in the last 20 years. This year’s investment will bring this number to over $100 billion. We are bringing more jobs, more technology and a boost to America’s AI capabilities.”
Siemens also will cut 450 jobs from its electric vehicles charging business, or about one-third of the total employed in that unit, the company said. That business, Siemens eMobility, develops and supplies EV charging infrastructure (AC and DC chargers), charging software, and services.
Earlier last fall, Siemens put forth a plan to combine the EV charging business with a DC charging business called Heliox, which it purchased in January 2024. Heliox is focused on producing chargers for electric commercial vehicles and buses.
Senior Editor Geert De Lombaerde contributed portions of this report.
