Siemens 2013 Annual Report Download - page 99

Contents Financial Report
97
A company like ours must aim to be a leader not only in technology but also in
long-term profitability. This has nothing to do with greed – but everything to do
with maintaining our innovative strength, enhancing our competitiveness and
safeguarding jobs while remaining a trusted and attractive partner for our share-
holders and investors worldwide.
We’re continuing to rigorously implement key elements of our Siemens 2014
program. We’ll bring the program to a successful conclusion, and it will drive our
profitability. All the steps we’re taking must be geared to the long term, strengthen
us on an ongoing basis and have an impact that extends beyond 2014. Because
we don’t want a brief margin-boosting flash in the pan, but changes that will keep
Siemens on the road to lasting success in order to preserve jobs and reinforce
our technology and market leadership. These changes will position us to narrow
and, in the medium term, close the gap in profitability to our competitors.
One thing is clear: Siemens will still be around after 2014. In fiscal 2013 – exactly
a hundred years after the construction of our Berlin-Siemensstadt location, the
site of our Company headquarters until 1949 – we laid the cornerstone for our new
headquarters in Munich. We’ve now also begun planning a new Siemens
campus
in Erlangen, Germany. Both of these construction projects are more than
a com-
mitment to the future of two locations steeped in Company tradition. They also
reflect our sense of obligation. We accept the responsibility that we have, day after
day and year after year, for the future of our Company. Generations of Siemens
employees have done their part to ensure that the Company in which
you hold
a stake is intrinsically sound today. I want our successors to be able to
say the
same thing about us in 20 or 30 years. Through our work, diligence and
dedication,
we – the Managing Board and the Company ’s more than 360,000 employees around
the world – can play a key role in shaping your Company ’s future. Joining forces,
we’ll act as though Siemens were our own company. That’s our pledge to you.
For the Managing Board
Joe Kaeser
President and CEO of Siemens AG