Siemens' new digital roadmap launched in China
Siemens, one of the heavyweight exhibitors at the ongoing China International Industry Fair, announced they will accelerate their digitalization strategy in China with a close partnership with Alibaba Cloud.
According to the agreement, Siemens’ Mindsphere, an open IoT operating system on Alibaba Cloud, will be available to Chinese customers around the end of the first quarter of 2019.
This marks another solid step forward since the Siemens and Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, signed their Memorandum of Understanding in Berlin in July this year.
Mindsphere on Alibaba Cloud can enable Chinese customers to leverage the opportunities of the Internet of Things and accelerate Chinese enterprises to realize digitalization.
Mindsphere is still unprofitable at present. It is predicted that the total research and development expense of Siemens will reach 5.6 billion euro and most of the spending will be invested in Mindsphere, said Lin Bin, vice president of Siemens China.
However he expressed that as China's government is promoting the plan of connecting millions of enterprises to the cloud platform, Siemens’ Mindsphere can play an important role in realizing that aim. If Siemens can achieve 10 percent or 20 percent of market share, the prediction that Mindsphere’s income and costs can balance out up to 2020 is possible,” Lin added.
Siemens’ investments in digital research of recent years, and the acquisition of a batch of leading software enterprises such as UGS, Mentor Graphics and Mendix, has made it one of the top ten software companies in the world. It now has 25,000 software researchers.
At present, the digitalization business may not bring profits for Siemens, but as Werner Von Siemens, the founder of Siemens said, “I won’t sell the future for short-term profit.” For Siemens, the future is, without doubt, digitalization.
