Modern art on the walls, honorable guests, good conversations.
That was three years ago.
Since then, this lunchtime meeting at the German ambassador in Singapore has grown into a veritable fish farm, anchored off the coast of the Southeast Asian city-state.
Siemens is its largest investor, and it is controlled using artificial intelligence.
In a few years it will be cloned so often that there will be at least one hundred such fish farms in Asia and America.
Then data should be the biggest catch of their German founders.
Christoph Hein
Business correspondent for South Asia / Pacific based in Singapore.
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“It all started with the then German ambassador in Singapore, who invited a group of business people to lunch.
The former regional head of Siemens, Armin Bruck, was urgently looking for a medium-sized company at which Siemens could demonstrate its still young concept of Industry 4.0, ”explains co-founder Dirk Eichelberger.
“Today we are breeding our fish with artificial intelligence from Siemens.” The 57-year-old is standing in front of ten giant blue Fieberg glass tanks on his pontoon in the sea at the equator.
He and his longtime friend Michael Voigtmann raised their farm out of nowhere.
“We were naive, we just tried, we taught ourselves most of it,” says Voigtmann.
A new beginning at sea
However, the duo did not start with empty hands in 2013. Both were experienced managers: the German-Australian Voigtmann, who had a doctorate in chemistry, and the doctorate in business administration Eichelberger held management positions at the medium-sized plastics manufacturer Rehau and later switched to Balda AG, which failed in the hands of financial juggler Lars Windhorst. “It is tough when you walk through fire like that,” says Eichelberger.
After these decades, the two looked for a new beginning.
They found this in Asia, where they had been active for years.
“It quickly became clear to us that fish was becoming more and more important as a source of protein,” Voigtmann said in an interview with the FAZ.
However, since the water is polluted and incalculable risks threaten in times of climate change, breeding fish in nets was not a solution.
So they filled the first basins of their Singapore Aquaculture Technologies (SAT) on a discarded boat with filtered seawater.
"We had to rethink breeding in order to reduce the enormous risks of dying an entire brood," says Eichelberger.
Face recognition software leads to success
A few days after lunch in the ambassador's residence, Siemens engineers took a look at the small farm off the coast. First they shook their heads, but then they rolled up their sleeves. In order to make their digital concepts palatable to Southeast Asia's SMEs, they needed a demonstration object that would pick up coveted buyers where they knew their way around: anyone who can control a fish farm using sensors and the click of a button could also drive a factory for car parts in the same way. Siemens was soon using the small farm in Singapore as an advertising object at trade fairs.