were joined now by the ceo of siemens roland busch thank you so much for joining us today as you release your earnings the stock near an all time high this set of numbers is a little more mixed than the last quarter so i want to sort of get into them now how did this quarter shake out and what really changed well i mean we are happy about another strong quarter of the index grew by 15 revenue per ten and the business delivered 3 billion cash flow so its a great quarter what we saw though is faster than expected normalization of the market and this was particularly driven by china but other than that sitting on another record order backlog of 110 billion i would say its another strong quarter of which we delivered and then you say normalization but orders were down 40 in china is that normal is that what youre expecting for china what is your experience of the economic situation right now in china so its a sense the market the chinese markets did not did not deliver as as we expected so we said always also in our last guidance that we expected china to recover in the second half of the calendar year this did not happen at all so china is really very very down in the market its the private consumption didnt pick up the export is down in june the export in china was on a record low for the last ten years so this is what happened and lets see how that goes this impacted our in particular our two industry businesses but electrification less so because they had a much much lower upturn in the past so they had also a kind of a more stable situation because most impacted the most impact was on the automation business and i see that that was sort of that was one of the parts that was revised down although a lot of the kind of other goals were kind of set were unchanged so what is your outlook more broadly and if it strength is not going to come from china where do you where do you think it will come from yeah so i mean let me let me reiterate we confirmed our groups outlook in terms of top line 9 to 11 growth also earnings per share excluding the impact from siemens energy so this is all good we kept everything stable except as you said the outlook for different industries and we brought it back to where it was before and based again based on the assumption that the chinese market would pick up in the second half of the calendar year did not happen so we brought the outlook back to where it was before thats basically about it going forward our trends the megatrends which we are working on the trends in the market of electrification automation digitalization of our markets they are unbroken so we see still a strong demand this will come there might be a slow growth in the chinese market for the next quarter so lets see if and when the chinese government is putting some stimulus on the market theres a lot of uncertainty there but i mean have in mind that this is still the second largest market in the world it will come back thats for sure on the other side we are one of the most global companies in the world so we have a very strong footprint in the united states we are serving india india is coming i was recently on a trip to south america where we see a lot of potential in renewables hydrogen but other areas as well food and beverage is working well so theres a lot of batteries of builds which we are we have a very very high market share so from that perspective its for me more the question of how long will china sit on this normalization before they pick up again and speaking of stimulative activity thats going on weve had a huge number of chip plant announcements here in germany how do you think that will impact siemens you can you profit from that or how involved are you in that and sort of how does that contribute to your business i mean thats great news for us on the one side we believe thats good to have a solid chip industry in europe and particularly swift out of germany we believe we have the competencies in the ecosystem and of course its a tailwind for our business we are very strong in electrifying any kind of semiconductor plants remember they are high energy consuming the building management is very critical think about the clean rooms which we have we are sitting with automation on the shop floor so this is really one of the really strong verticals of siemens and if this vertical growth we will see the impact on siemens to do you think that the chip industry gets at all an unfair advantage that seems to get a lot of focus in germany do you think that other industries could benefit in order to have some more of that sort of activity in germany i mean let me start with the question do we need a chip industry in europe at all currently the dependency is very strong in asia and if it comes to high powered chipsets its just taiwan where the chips are coming from so we need we need a diversification you know united states is having put a lot of stimulus money but i believe coming from one dependency to another one is also not good so having a solid semiconductor industry in europe is a good idea to have a buffer of that as i said before this is not only the chip manufacturer the foundries is also the whole ecosystem around which is supporting it so this bill will create jobs it will stimulate an ecosystem and its high tech this is technology well i believe germany should go in looking what are the technologies which are really make a differentiation high tech thats very good at and if its ecosystem based we are even better think about our small and medium sized enterprises which we have and in germany the hidden champions so therefore i believe this is one of the poster child of an industry where we believe we should really stimulate and get all the the fertilising effects for others as well and since you mentioned the smes in the middle stand im curious because we see the pmi manufacturing figure in germany basically at the lowest level since the pandemic when there was zero activity however i see a lot of these big industrial companies the auto sector they all seem to be doing okay where is this weakness where is this manufacturing recession you have a lot of clients throughout this industry where is it being felt i mean you see that in germany you see those in italy where we have the machine builders machine tool builders and remember a lot of that volume goes also to china so if china this is the most industrialized economy in the world and again the second largest if they are weak we see that also then a weakness on any kind of export coming from germany to china so therefore its interlinked i do believe again this is kind of intermediate weakness we see a pickup because the level of automation of digitalization needed when you build new plants like semiconductor plants new battery plants this will kick in and theres a lot of machines going into these markets and that will come back on a global scale definitely united states will be very strong we have a very strong foothold there too and in terms of i just want ask you quickly about siemens energy could you still hold a 25 stake there do you are you confident that theyre going to be able to get their arms around this crisis very soon and do you think youll have to look at potentially revaluing that stake i think theres a question you have to ask to and how they are doing we are very much disappointed with what happens so that the quality issues are not getting under control lets see what the next measures are but i do believe they have a strong team in place and they will make it they will solve these problems i hope it doesnt take too long regarding the evaluation i mean its a clear statement from our side we are going to dilute our share we did it 68 sold down were sitting on 251 it will go further down so this is the past going forward as we said and were going to execute and you said a lot of side money aside for acquisitions do you have a clear idea of what kinds of things youll be looking at and how what the cadence of those acquisitions could be yeah we do have a clear idea of cause were looking in a broad space of we have first and foremost we do have the firepower we can do any kind of acquisition we would like to do but you have to be careful so it has the right return so if youre looking of course into the software space our industrial software space but also any kind of adjacent fields where we believe we can do more doubling down on our on our very very strong software business is a good idea we are looking in any kind of hardware which is connected so which has a certain intelligence which connects to the cloud we can think of so there is plenty of space and on the other side we do have a very very solid rounded product portfolio and good that some of our partners which we serve via our siemens accelerator open business marketplace we can really serve the market quite well but again we are looking to the markets and we will make similar steps as we did in the past taking care about the right return if we are going to invest in m  a and then i guess just a follow up on that in terms of the market conditions given that interest rates have gone up maybe some asset values have come down if you are holding in a strong cash positions are the conditions good right now to do a deal for you you guys have said we are we are not really leveraged we have a very very solid very very solid financing you have a very strong balance sheet we had recently also an upgrade by the rating agencies so from our perspective this is not a concern we have we are ready to strike if there is a great target ready to strike if there is a good opportunity roland busch thank you so much the ceo of siemens