“We are very competitive, including in China,” Siemens’s CEO says. Investors sold anyway

Roland Busch was in a confident mood. “We are very competitive, including in China,” the Siemens chief executive told Bloomberg Television. He pointed to new products that, he said, are “winning new customers and even winning customers back”.

That is rare talk from a Western industrial giant in a market where Chinese rivals are on the march.

He had reason to sound upbeat. Siemens raised a key earnings measure on Thursday for the second time this year. Every division grew, and a surge in data-centre spending lifted its infrastructure business. Then investors sold the shares down as much as 6.4%.

Good, but not good enough

The problem was expectations, not performance. Analysts had hoped the data-centre boom would show up more forcefully in the numbers. Siemens’s uplift “appears less pronounced than peers,” RBC Capital Markets wrote. Schneider Electric raised its own outlook last week on triple-digit data-centre demand, and ABB is riding the same wave.

Siemens is still Germany’s most valuable company, worth about €212bn, and its stock is up around 13% this year. But in an AI-fuelled boom that is minting winners across industrial tech, a solid quarter can look like falling behind.

The data-centre engine

The bright spot is unmistakable. Orders from data centres tripled to around €6bn in the first nine months of the year. The demand is for switchgear and cooling gear, the kit that powers and chills the halls. Siemens lifted its Smart Infrastructure growth outlook, and is spending €300m near Frankfurt to make more switchgear.

It wants to sell into the build, not just the buildings. Siemens offers a digital twin that lets customers model a whole AI factory before a brick is laid. It is also working with Nvidia on a blueprint for the next generation of them. And it is pushing 800-volt DC power, liquid cooling and solid-state transformers, the hardware the compute boom cannot run without.

China up, Europe flat

The geography tells the real story. Profitability at the Digital Industries unit, which sells factory automation and software, jumped 44% on growth in the US and China. Busch says Siemens has launched dozens of China-specific products, growing in the mid-20% range. Even so, its Asian orders rose 17%, well behind the 43% of local rival Shenzhen Inovance.

Home is the drag. Demand from European factories stays subdued, and Germany’s carmakers, a core Siemens customer, will “not improve quickly,” Busch said. So the company that keeps the world’s data centres running is, for now, growing fastest everywhere except at home.