On April 23, 2012 the largest industrial tradeshow in the world will be opening its doors again in Hanover. Construction of the Siemens booth in Hall 9 has been underway since the beginning of the month. Siemens has been one of the exhibitors at what was originally known as the “Export Fair”. To find out how Siemens’ exhibitions at the tradeshow have changed in the past 65 years, take a look here.more

 

Up until 1903, the Elektrizitäts-Aktiengesellschaft vorm. Schuckert & Co., Nürnberg (EAG) was one of Siemens & Halske AG (S&H)’s main competitors. During the 1880s and 1890s the company focused mainly on the south German market and was quite often chosen for lucrative public sector contracts in preference to S&H. No-one would have thought at the time that the two competitors would one day merge.more

 

Women in management, as topical an issue as ever: of the 190 members of DAX company managing boards only seven are women. They are also under-represented in middle management, comprising only 20 percent of all team leaders in Germany. The career of Dr. Marie Busch, who started work just under 100 years ago with a company that was a forerunner of the present Healthcare Sector and retired after over 40 years as a respected member of the management, is therefore all the more remarkable. On the occasion of International Women’s Day, we look at the life of one of the first female managers at Siemens.more

 

It’s that time of year again: on January 24, 2012, the Annual Shareholders’ Meeting of Siemens AG will be held at the Olympiahalle in Munich. And this occasion has inspired us to compile a photo gallery documenting how this yearly event has evolved over the years since the 1950s.more

 

In 1847 the 33- year-old precision engineer Johann Georg Halske founded together with Werner von Siemens the company that bore their names. Who was this man, who kept rather in the background by comparison with his world-famous partner?more

 

At the end of the 19th century, Siemens had a global workforce of 6,500 and generated revenue of almost 20 million marks. In order to remain competitive and have the means to invest in future technologies, the company which was founded as a general partnership in summer 1897 was converted into a stock corporation.more

 

The President and CEO of Siemens is an important person with an important position. He confers with political leaders and makes decisions that establish his company’s strategic orientation and determine its success or failure.  For his achievements, he’s esteemed and at times also honored. And so it was with Siemens’ first head: the more successful the Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens & Halske became, the greater was Werner Siemens’ personal prestige in Prussian society. One of the highpoints of his public recognition: ennoblement by the German Emperor.more

 

Restructuring – for some a taboo, for others a savior, but sometimes simply unavoidable: in 1932, medical engineering at Siemens had its back to the wall. Annually mounting losses in the wake of the worldwide economic crisis of 1929 increased the pressure on the business's managers and forced them at last to act. The result was a success: by 1939, Siemens-Reiniger-Werke, a child of necessity, was a world market leader in many areas.more

 

In the age of e-mail, SMS texting and twitter, it is hard to image that a fast and reliable way to transmit messages was one of the central questions of the 19^thcentury. Werner von Siemens recognized this challenge and focused his physics experiments and studies on electrical telegraphy, starting in the mid-1840s. His efforts were successful. For more than 160 years, the Siemens name has stood for innovative products and solutions.more

 

The award-winning Siemens company film "Impulse of our Time" was premiered on October 16, 1959 in the Film-Casino Munich.more

 

Today, 90 years after Siemens acquired an interest in Osram, the lighting producer is one of the most traditional brands in the world, and a global synonym for light. You can find out how the Osram-Gesellschaft has developed since 1920 with the substantial participation of Siemens in the article here.more

 

Like many entrepreneurial pioneers from the era of German industrialization, for decades Werner von Siemens dominated not just his company's image and identity, but the form and content of corporate communications. After the company founder's death in 1892, as the product range began proliferating, Siemens & Haske's clear corporate profile was in danger of getting blurred. In response, at the beginning of the 20^thcentury corporate management established the company's first organizational units to deal systematically with public relations work and market communications.more

 

The Siemens AG that we know today was founded in October 1847 as "Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens & Halske." Through his inventions, visionary entrepreneur Werner von Siemens, who was born on December 13, 1816, was instrumental in transforming Germany from a backward agricultural country to one of the world's leading industrial nations. His business philosophy still influences the strategy and policies of our company to the present day.more

 

In 1983, Siemens’ top management announced that the development and production of megabit memory chips would henceforth be a strategic company goal. The aim was to close the gap to the market-leading Japanese producers by 1989. To achieve its objective, Siemens cooperated with Dutch and Japanese partners. At the end 1987, the first one-megabit DRAM chips went into series production in Regensburg, Germany. In the summer of 1988, Siemens became the first producer on the world market to supply customer samples of a four-megabit DRAM device. The company had joined the ranks of the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturers.more

 

If one wished to rank the Siemens brothers according to how famous they are, Werner von Siemens would be the undisputed leader by far. Less well known, but still familiar to people who know something about the family would be Werner’s younger brothers, Wilhelm (William) and Carl Siemens. Far fewer have heard of Friedrich August Siemens, although in his own field he was one of the most successful inventors and entrepreneurs of his time.more

 

At the beginning of the 1870s there were three cable links between the Old and the New World. All these transatlantic cables were in the possession of John Pender from the UK, who resolutely defended his monopoly. As a result of this domination, many people, especially American business people and public figures, were increasingly in favor of a non-British communication link. The only people who were considered capable of this task were the Siemens brothers. And they took up the challenge.more

 

The German Federal President quoted Goethe and the head of the German national railway company Deutsche Bahn was full of enthusiasm: after the official acceptance at the end of May at the station of Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe, the new flagship of the Deutsche Bahn commenced regular service at 5.53 p.m. on June 2, 1991. With the help of Siemens.more

 

Economically transporting energy over distances of hundreds of kilometers was and still is one of the central challenges for electrical engineering. For exceptionally long distances, high-voltage, direct-current (HVDC) power transmission has been an especially efficient solution since the 1970s. Forty years ago, Siemens built the first major HVDC line in southern Africa.more

 

130 years ago – on May 16, 1881 – Siemens & Halske put the first electric streetcar in the world into service in the Berlin suburb of Groß-Lichterfelde. The 2.5-kilometer route connected the Lichterfelde station of the Anhalt Railway (today the Berlin station Lichterfelde Ost), with the military institute in Zehlendorfer Straße (today: Finckensteinallee). In the first three months alone the railway carried 12,000 passengers.more

 

On April 29, 1882, an open hunting carriage in Halensee near Berlin caused a stir. The vehicle moved forward without being drawn by horses or running on rails – as was then usual. Observant bystanders however noticed the cables leading up to an electric overhead line which caused the vehicle to move. As the world’s first trolleybus, it laid the foundation for an entirely new form of motorized travel.more

 

Back in the 19th century, it took several days for important political and economic news to travel from the superpower of the day, England, to its most important colony, India. The first time a message from Calcutta reached London in “only” 28 minutes, it was a world sensation. The 11,000-kilometer telegraph link, one of the most important “lighthouse projects” of Siemens & Halske, established the young company’s global reputation.more

 

In the fall of 1877, Heinrich von Stephan initiates the first telephone experiments in Germany. Excited by the idea of being able to communicate in real-time, Stephan, then the General Postal Director of the German Empire, commissions Werner von Siemens to refine the telephone system invented by American Alexander Graham Bell. In November of the same year, Stephan authorizes the opening of the first telegraph office with telephone service in Friedrichsberg near Berlin (Berlin-Lichtenberg).The first exchange dedicated solely to telephone calls would follow less than four years later.more

 

Only three months after the discovery of “x-rays” by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, the x-ray tube was decisively improved by Siemens & Halske. Thanks to company developments, the vacuum and related gas pressure inside the tube could be regulated, making it possible to increase pressure during the exposure itself in order to produce the most intensive radiation and sharpest images.more

 

In autumn 1866, Werner von Siemens was spending more time on the question of how to improve spinning dynamos as they existed at that time. The only usable sources of electricity at that time were electrochemical batteries and simple spinning dynamos, but they lacked the power to be used for anything but telegraphic purposes and small galvanic applications.more

 

The Swedish engineer Rune Elmqvist was a true pioneer of medical engineering. Together with the doctor Ǻke Senning, he developed the fully implantable pacemaker, the first of which was inserted into a human body over 50 years ago. While the energy of the first pacemakers was used up after only a few hours, present devices last an average of eight to ten years.more

 

Today we automatically reach the individual floors of high buildings by elevator. This was not always the case; for a long time people had to trudge up every flight of stairs. That is certainly one of the reasons why the era of skyscrapers only began at the end of the 19^thcentury.more

 

The year 2012 is a very special one for Siemens Healthcare’s production and development facility in Kemnath. On May 25, the plant, which is located in the Oberpfalz region of Germany, will celebrate its 50^th anniversary. In an interview on the history of the facility, Alfred Koch, its current head, looks back with pride: “Fifty years ago, a few pioneers began to develop Siemens’ operations in Kemnath. Who’d have thought we’d become a global center of competence for mechatronics?”more

 

Built in 1898 west of a canal branching off the River Spree in Berlin, Siemens’ cable factory – the Kabelwerk-Westend – was soon too small to cope with demand from the rapidly growing energy and telecommunications markets. As a result, planning for a new facility was begun in the early 1910s.more

 

In 1998 the fossil fuel power plant business of the Westinghouse Corporation was taken over by Siemens AG. By this time, both electrical engineering companies could look back on a long and successful partnership. The first patent and know-how exchange contract had already been signed in fall 1924.more

 

“We will probably soon get started in China. The ambassador here has reported back to China and as a result the Chinese administration […] has expressed a wish to obtain dynamos from us.” With these lines written to his brother Carl in 1879, Werner von Siemens noted the beginning of relationships with China. Siemens had already delivered pointer telegraphs seven years previously. In spite of all the ups and downs resulting from the political situation, a partnership was built up on this basis which has now connected the company with this huge country in the south east for over 130 years.more

 

Every year, the Association for Company History (Gesellschaft für Unternehmensgeschichte – GUG) organizes a symposium to give fresh impetus to historical research and provide an opportunity to discuss topics of current interest in the field. This year, the main topic was “immigrant entrepreneurs” – that is, business leaders who worked in countries other than those in which they were raised and educated. Carl von Siemens was such an entrepreneur. The youngest brother of Werner von Siemens, he grew up in Germany but worked successfully for decades in Russia and England. Through his achievements as a managing director, an independent entrepreneur and the head of challenging major projects, he made a key contribution to the development of Siemens & Halske into a “worldwide enterprise like that of the Fuggers.”more

 

Even before Werner von Siemens founded “Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens & Halske” in Berlin in 1847, he began marketing his inventions in the United Kingdom. As early as 1843, he sent his brother Wilhelm (officially William as of 1859) to London with instructions to patent an electrolytic method of gold and silver plating he had patented in Prussia. One year later, in 1844, Wilhelm settled permanently in London as a “civil engineer” and opened a sales agency for Siemens & Halske on March 16, 1850.more

 

Every type of business needs "lighthouse projects" – and this was as true in the days of the Siemens brothers as it is now. The permanent electric lighting for the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg provided by Werner von Siemens' brother Carl was just such a project. The successful conclusion of the project marked a breakthrough for Siemens as a supplier of electric lighting in Russia.more

 

Active in Spain for 115 years, Siemens holds a leading position in the country's industry, energy and healthcare sectors. One of Siemens' most important facilities in Spain, its factory in Cornellá near Barcelona, has now belonged to the tradition-rich German company for 100 years.more

 

For decades, Siemens has demonstrated that far-sighted management and a motivated workforce are instrumental in carrying the company successfully through periods of worldwide financial crisis and economic difficulty. Siemens' X-ray tube factory in Rudolstadt, a small town in the German state of Thüringen, is a prime example. The facility's turbulent beginnings are now the subject of a doctoral dissertation.more

 

The Greek company A. Zachariou tops the list of foreign representatives on the cover of the first Siemens News of 1900. In February of that year, Siemens & Halske had signed a general agency agreement with the Piraeus-based enterprise.more

 

Carl von Siemens, the younger brother of the company's founder, was one of the main instigators of the international expansion that began not long after Siemens & Halske was founded.more

 

Since the construction of a first power plant in Bern Canton over 110 years ago, the Siemens name has been closely associated with Switzerland.more

 

Between the end of March and the middle of November 1909, the Allgemeine Elektrizitätsgesellschaft (AEG) built a new assembly hall on the premises of their turbine factory in Berlin-Moabit, which made the headlines...more

 

Environmental protection has a long tradition at Siemens AG and is an integral part of the corporate strategy. With the official opening of a corporate environmental protection office 40 years ago, Siemens acknowledged the theme as a key issue for the futuremore

 

Healthcare was part of the company’s social policy right from the beginning. At Siemens it was recognized at an early stage that a targeted health policy had a preventive effect that was beneficial to the company, since it noticeably reduced absences from work due to sickness. Before there was even a state health policy, Werner von Siemens had established medical services at his company.more

 

For decades Werner von Siemens saw no reason to train apprentices. Even in 1885 he is recorded as saying, "I don't think it is appropriate for large factories to be basically involved in apprenticeship training, I […] have thus prohibited it in my factory." Von Siemens was not alone in this opinion; numerous company owners were skeptical about the quality of training for skilled workers in a large factory with series production and piecework rates. Parents were recommended instead to obtain apprenticeships for their sons "at smaller mechanics' workshops where they would be trained more quickly and usually probably also to a better standard." This attitude was however soon to change.more

 

Siemens AG has been offering its employees the opportunity to buy shares at preferential rates since 1969. By issuing employee shares, the company acknowledges the contribution of the workforce to its business success and at the same time encourages their identification with the company's goals.more

 

Exactly 195 years ago, on December 13, 1816, the founder of the present Siemens AG was born in Lenthe near Hanover. To mark the occasion, the Siemens Historical Institute has produced the first iPad app on the subject of Siemens’ history. The story of Werner von Siemens’ life is told in eight exciting episodes with an unusual slant.more

 

On June 28, 1918, just a few months after the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks nationalized all industrial enterprises in Soviet Russia. This measure also affected the Siemens production facility in revolutionary Petersburg, a plant rich in tradition that after a success story of more than 60 years became the property of the state. Little did anyone suspect that, within only a few years, business with the socialist “class enemy” would develop into one of the mainstays of the company. A publication by the historian Martin Lutz sheds light for the first time on this unusual phase of Siemens history. The study is based primarily on sources from Siemens archives in Munich.more

 

"But there is no way we cannot get involved in the U.S. Our […] activity in the United States will […] be a new test of our ability to perform and adapt." With these words in 1974, the Member of the Managing Board responsible for the Central Sales and Marketing Division, Paul Dax, summed up the importance of the American market for Siemens. When, in what form and with which strategies Siemens succeeded in passing the U.S. test is the subject of an academic dissertation which is being produced in close cooperation with Siemens Corporate Archives Munich.more

 

The Siemens History Website is the platform for information about the history and development of Siemens. Over the past few weeks this website, which was launched in April 2002, has been redesigned and expanded.more