Siemens's Green Energy Sales Grow

By VANESSA FUHRMANS
German engineering conglomerate Siemens AG said its revenue from energy-saving and other green technology products rose 11% to €23 billion (about $34.5 billion) over the past year, more than a quarter of its total expected sales in fiscal 2009.
Siemens, long a world leader in coal-fired and nuclear-energy plant production, is increasingly generating its sales from products such as energy-saving turbine engines, solar inverter systems and components for so-called smart electricity grids. The growth in such environmentally minded products helped keep the German engineering giant's overall sales steady in an otherwise difficult year.
"Our green products and solutions are contributing to stabilizing our business during the economic crisis," said Barbara Kux, Siemens management board member and chief sustainability officer. The company has said it expects to generate the same level of total sales in fiscal 2009 as it did in 2008, or €77.3 billion.
Siemens is moving to capitalize on the carbon-dioxide emission-reduction targets many companies now have to meet. It's also banking on growth from the hundreds of billions of euros that governments around the world plan to spend over the next several years to make power grids, transportation networks and other infrastructure more efficient and less damaging to the environment.
"We don't just want to talk about it," Ms. Kux said in an interview. "We have the solutions in our pocket."
Siemens also announced Tuesday its first wind energy order from Latin America. The $270 million contract, from Mexican wind energy developer Grupo Soluciones en Energias Renovables, is to build 70 wind turbines for the Los Vergeles wind farm in Tamaulipas, Mexico. The project is intended to supply more than 200,000 Mexican households with clean power by the end of 2010.
Write to Vanessa Fuhrmans at vanessa.fuhrmans@wsj.com