News

Siemens Complete a Troubled Year with Profits Jump

A lot of Blue chips have been announcing their financial results this week. Yesterday Siemens tried to lay to rest the controversy over executive pay and the closure of its mobile handset business by delivering a 12% jump in full-year earnings to £3.55bn.

The group has been savaged by leading politicians, including German chancellor Angela Merkel, for selling its loss-making handset business to Taiwan's BenQ, which closed the business less than a year later with the loss of 2,000 jobs despite injecting hundreds of millions of euros.

Its board was forced to defer 30% pay rises and donate the money instead to a fund to retrain redundant staff.

Klaus Kleinfeld, Siemens chief executive, will now be pressed to explain the lack of progress in disposing of the group's business telecoms networks business.

The troubled communications division (Com), which lost €82m in the final quarter, reduced annual losses from €421m to €283m while the computer networks business, SBS, cut its annual losses from €690m to €549m.

Siemens is retaining SBS but dismembering Com.