At its Innovation Day in mid-December,Siemens announced the establishment of 20 centers for digital customer applications in industry. Each of these "Mindsphere Application Centers" specializes in a specific industry and comprises several locations in different countries. In total, the 20 centers are spread across around 50 locations in 17 countries. Together with Siemens customers, around 900 software developers, data specialists and engineers are already developing digital innovations for data analysis and machine learning at these centers.

Siemens rolled out the Mindsphere IoT operating system company-wide around a year ago. Around one million devices and systems are currently connected via Mindsphere. This figure is set to rise to 1.25 million by the end of the 2018 financial year. From January 2018, the IoT operating system will also be available on Amazon Web Services, as Klaus Helmrich announced at SPS IPC Drives.

The Group also announced figures for its digital business: According to these, Siemens was able to increase sales with digital technologies to €5.2 billion in the past fiscal year - €4 billion of which was attributable to software and €1.2 billion to digital services. This corresponds to an increase of 20% compared to the previous year. According to the company, this is well above the market growth rate of around 8%.

More expenditure on R&D

Siemens will once again increase its research and development (R&D) expenditure in the current fiscal year and invest an additional 450 million euros. In doing so, the Group aims to further increase the speed of innovation. R&D expenditure will thus increase from around €5.2 billion in fiscal year 2017 to over €5.6 billion. More than three billion euros of R&D expenditure went to Germany in the past financial year. R&D investments have risen by around 40% since 2014.

Around 500 million euros of R&D expenditure in the current financial year is flowing into so-called company core technologies, the central fields of technology and innovation. These include additive manufacturing, autonomous robotics, data analysis and artificial intelligence, digital twins as well as power electronics and distributed energy systems.