Siemens presented its new investment strategy on June 15, which includes €2 billion ($2.16 billion) primarily for new manufacturing capacity as well as innovation labs, education centers, and other sites in Southeast Asia, in order to boost future growth, drive innovation. and increase resilience.

“Our technologies address secular growth trends where our customers need our support to become more competitive, resilient, and sustainable,” said Mr. Roland Busch, President and CEO of Siemens AG. “Siemens is experiencing significantly above-market growth.”

The investments underpin Siemens’s strategy of combining the real and the digital worlds as well as its focus on diversification and local-for-local business. “We are clearly doubling down on our strong global presence to support growth in the most relevant markets in the world,” he added.

There is also an expected increase of around €500 million ($541.32 million) in research and development (R&D) this year, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the industrial metaverse. This R&D will be focused on strengthening Siemens’ leading position in core technologies, including simulation, digital twins, AI, and power electronics, and on supporting the development of the Siemens Xcelerator open digital business platform.

Within the strategy, Siemens also announced that an entirely new high-tech factory will be built in Singapore, which will be developed using Siemens’s own leading digital twin and innovative, intelligent hardware technologies to meet growing demand in Southeast Asia. Total investment in the factory will be around €200 million ($216.84 million).

It will set a new standard in connectivity to showcase the possibilities of digitalization and will incorporate highly-automated manufacturing processes. The investment will create over 400 jobs. “The new factory in Singapore will become one of four highly-automated factories working together with agile production methods to fill orders from around the world as efficiently as possible,” Mr. Busch explained. “This digital twin will be used to optimize output, making it 20 per cent more productive than the factories of the past.”

Within the framework of the announcement, an MoU signing between Mr. Lim Tu Young, Senior Vice President and Head of the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), Dr. Thai Lai Pham, CEO of Siemens ASEAN and Vietnam, and Dr. Leow Thiam Seng, Group Director of the JTC Corporation, took place, on building the new Singapore factory.

As part of its investment strategy and fast-growing business in China, Siemens will also expand its digital factory in Chengdu to serve the local growth opportunities in China for China, investing €140 million ($151.61 million) and creating 400 new jobs. “China is the key market for technology, which is also why we created a new digital R&D Innovation Center in Shenzhen to speed up the development of motion control systems with digitalization and power electronics technology,” Mr. Busch said.