Despite headwinds from delivery bottlenecks and high inflation, Siemens remains confident for the new fiscal year given an order backlog of more than 100 billion euros.

In the past year 2021/22, the Dax group achieved record operating results and is now increasing the dividend.

Ilka Kopplin

Business correspondent in Munich.

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"The high demand for our hardware and software offerings continues," said CEO Roland Busch at the balance sheet press conference.

Group-wide sales are expected to grow by between 6 and 9 percent.

This makes the long-established group even more optimistic than in the past financial year, when sales were expected to increase by up to 8 percent.

The industrial business should therefore continue to grow profitably.

For earnings per share, Siemens expects a range between 8.70 and 9.20 euros - after 5.47 euros in the past fiscal year, which was also influenced by high depreciation.

Without the impairment charge, Siemens achieved earnings per share of EUR 8.84.

Depreciation on stake in Siemens Energy charged

Siemens closed the past fiscal year (ending September) with record figures.

Sales increased by 8.2 percent to 72 billion euros - and thus even slightly more than Siemens had predicted.

Incoming orders grew by 17 percent to 89 billion euros.

The group also increased the digital business, with which Siemens intends to increasingly generate sales in the future, by around 15 percent to 6.5 billion euros.

“In the 2022 fiscal year, Siemens once again achieved an excellent performance with a record result of over 10 billion euros in the industrial business.

We successfully executed our strategy, gained market share and achieved value-added growth,” said Busch.

Growth drivers were once again the industrial automation business, but also the smart infrastructure.

The bottom line, however, was only 4.4 billion euros after 6.7 billion euros in the previous year.

The reason for this was a multi-billion dollar write-down on the block of shares in the energy technology company Siemens Energy, which has been listed independently since autumn 2020, but in which Siemens AG still holds around 35 percent.

First quarterly loss in twelve years in the summer

In the summer, Siemens had written off the share by 2.7 billion euros due to the high price loss of the energy technology group, which had brought Siemens its first quarterly loss in twelve years.

This meant that the Dax group had to scale back its own targets for the year as a whole.

The withdrawal from Russia, where Siemens was particularly active in the train business, also weighed on the books.

However, some sales had a positive effect.

Among other things, Siemens had parted with the letter logistics division and the traffic technology company Yunex.

The shareholders should participate and receive a dividend of EUR 4.25 per share after EUR 4 per share in the previous year.