Energy-efficient solutions and environmental technologies from our Environmental Portfolio typically have a three-fold advantage: they benefit our customers, who boost their own success through low energy costs and higher productivity; they benefit future generations, whose living and environmental conditions we’re preserving and helping improve; and they benefit our own company by enabling us to tap attractive markets and generate profitable growth.
The Siemens portfolio largely consists of capital goods with long lifecycles and used by our customers for long periods of time. We maintain close ties with our customers and develop a large part of our portfolio in collaboration with them, often on site. This is particularly true of our Environmental Portfolio products and solutions, designed to help protect the environment and the climate. There are three main categories in the portfolio:
Due to its growth prospects and its significance for our company, we’ve firmly anchored our Environmental Portfolio in our strategic planning process. The qualification of products and solutions for our Environmental Portfolio is based on defined processes and strict criteria. Once a year, the Siemens Sustainability Board acknowledges the changes in the Environmental Portfolio. This covers the inclusion of newly developed products and solutions fulfilling our qualification criteria as well as additionally qualified products and solutions for which proof for the fulfillment of the qualification criteria was previously not available. For additionally qualified products and solutions, we report their prior-year revenue and prior-year contribution to reducing customer carbon dioxide emissions on a comparable basis.
Furthermore, the Sustainability Board takes decisions regarding the exclusion of products and solutions that no longer fulfill our qualification criteria from the Environmental Portfolio. To qualify for the Environmental Portfolio, a product or solution must fall into one of the three categories mentioned above. In fiscal 2012, for example, we added frequency inverters.
As in previous years, we again commissioned an independent accounting firm with a limited assurance engagement to review the reported results for our Environmental Portfolio for fiscal 2012. This review was conducted in accordance with the International Standard on Assurance Engagements (ISAE) 3000, Assurance Engagements Other than Audits or Reviews of Historical Financial Information. Nothing came to the independent accounting firm’s attention that would cause them to believe that the section "Siemens Environmental Portfolio 2012" of the Environmental Portfolio Report 2012 – containing the revenues generated by the Environmental Portfolio and the annual customer reduction of carbon dioxide emissions attributable to it – has not been prepared, in all material respects, in accordance with the defined reporting principles.
2011-Mar-09 | Author