Siemens AG CEO says digitisation, automation & sustainability to be the growth engines of future

German engineering and technology company Siemens AG on Thursday said digitisation, automation and sustainability will be the growth engines of the future.

In an interview with CNBC-TV18, Roland Busch, president and CEO, said, "In India, we are doing a lot in automating and digitising. People have completely different kinds of skills which we need. So this is an opportunity for many countries, but also for many people."

"We had talked about megatrends and we had the megatrend of global warming. We had the megatrend of urbanisation, as well as of globalisation. At that time, we already called it localisation as we believed that there was more and more local content required. Now the megatrends is an ageing society, which is not only about the labour market but also about the healthcare system and then the added digitisation because we saw digitisation is transforming all our industries, regardless of whether it is infrastructure, mobility or the energy sector or the healthcare sector."

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"Then COVID just accelerated these trends amazingly - digitisation, if you think about how you worked in the last 12 to 18 months, it was from now to then all remote, people were not travelling anymore, and so we used digital technologies, manufacturing sites were automated and digitised. They were running through the crisis because they didn't have so many people on the shop floor needed and service for example if we do service remotely, we could really keep our assets up and running while others had to shut down for even acceptance tests, which we did virtually with our customers," he said.

"With COVID there, we were triggering stimulus programmes all around the world. Stimulus money is not supposed to go into good old economies but obviously, the governments said that if I put stimulus money on the table, I want to have the new technologies, I want to really deal with the challenges of the future. I believe that the fight against climate change was accelerated by COVID because this stimulus money now goes into more sustainable technologies, which are helping to keep global warming on a low level," Busch said.