Siemens' new strategy: 'Made for India' products

BERLIN, GERMANY: With a focus on healthcare, energy and renewables, diversified German giant Siemens has charted a new strategy to design and develop some 60 products specially for India, targeting $1.3 billion in annual revenues from them alone by 2020.

"This is part if what we call 'baseline strategy' to develop a whole range of products specifically engineered and developed for the Indian market. India and China are among our focus countries," said Bernd Eitel, a spokesperson for Siemens.

"The idea is to create tailor-made products that take into account lower paying capacity in a section of the Indian market. The philosophy is: No compromise with quality, but some compromise with features," Eitel told a group of journalists here.

"Let me clarify: Of course, we will continue to sell our high-end products and solutions to those who want it and those who can afford it. So the new range of products will add incremental value to our total revenues."

Officials of this global giant said the group's association with India dates back nearly 150 years: Siemens was the company that helped lay a telegraph link between London and Kolkata way back in 1867.

As a company, though, Siemens was set up in India nearly nine decades ago in 1922.

Today, the Siemens Group in India comprises 17 companies, providing direct jobs to 18,000 people. It has 21 manufacturing units, a wide network up of sales and service offices across the country, as well as over 500 channel partners.

According to Eitel, Siemens started experimenting with the new strategy two years ago and has since developed 10 low-cost, baseline products. These include an x-ray scanner, being manufactured in Goa and sold both in India and abroad.

Another is a 1,200kV circuit breaker being manufactured at their unit at Aurangabad in Maharashtra that has a huge environment impact as it needs less than half the space used by the existing 800kV systems with fewer transmitting lines for the same power.

"Both these products have been locally developed, locally designed with locally sourced materials," Eitel said, adding more such products will roll out over the next decade.

Speaking about the financials, he said Siemens India received new orders worth nearly $3.25 billion in financial year 2010. The group's India operations logs annual revenues of over $2.5 billion.

"We hope to roughly grow at twice India's GDP."