Siemens Making Progress on Ambitious Sustainability Goals
When you are an international organisation the size and complexity of Siemens, sustainability can be a challenge. With some 320,000 people worldwide, it’s a significant footprint.
The top tech company helps create more efficient factories, adds resilience to stretched supply chains, designs smarter buildings, provides advanced healthcare, and delivers cleaner mobility. This is technology with genuine purpose.
So with the company delivering on many fronts when it comes to sustainability, how is it performing when it comes to meeting its own targets?
Siemens’ latest Sustainability report highlights some significant achievements, including slashing its own CO2 emissions (since 2019) and having nearly a third of top management positions held by women.
Siemens’ products and technologies can deliver decarbonisation, protect the planet, and help in the transformation to a circular economy. This is especially true in the important infrastructure, industry, healthcare and transportation sectors that combined are responsible for three quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions.
More than 90% of Siemens’ business helps customers with their own sustainability objectives, with Siemens estimating the technology it provided in 2023 helped customers avoid 190 million tonnes of CO2 emissions – up almost a quarter on the previous year.
“We’ve been making strong progress towards our ambitious sustainability targets,” said Judith Wiese, member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG and Chief People and Sustainability Officer.
“We are making an effective contribution toward combatting climate change and are driving the sustainability transformation of our customers and economies.”
Wiese believes – like many people – that technology is the key to a sustainable future, and it is people who will develop this technology. That’s why Siemens is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in training employees for the skills of the future – skills that encompass technology and sustainability.
Siemens has a 360-Degree Approach to ESG
When it comes to environment, social and governance (ESG) targets, Siemens has devised a strategic framework it calls DEGREE. This allows Siemens to tackle sustainability across six areas of action:
- Decarbonisation
- Ethics
- Governance
- Resource efficiency
- Equity
- Employability
Siemens is making good progress as it aims to become carbon neutral by 2030.
Siemens has already halved its CO2 emissions compared to 2019 and by the end of fiscal 2025, it intends to achieve a 55% physical reduction in CO2 emissions from its own business. By 2030, that figure will be around 90%.
Siemens is also tackling waste – reducing material sent to landfill by 15% (compared to 2021).
Significant Making Progress in Workplace Equity
It is not just about reductions, of course, and Siemens is heading in the right direction when it comes to equity. In fiscal 2023, 31% of leadership positions were held by women. In 2020, that was just 23%.
Powering this shift has been Siemens’ Global Equity program – which focuses on equal rights and treatment in the application process and in internal promotions.
Proving the points that sustainability is good for business, the Siemens Group generated revenue of €77.8 billion (US$84.2 billion) in FY23 and net income of €8.5 billion (US$9.2 billion).
This is also good news for the customers of Siemens, and for the planet.
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