Beating the Old Hands

Like most German industries at the close of World War II, the sprawling electronics operation of Siemens AG was mostly rubble. When the country began to reindustrialize, Siemens was pump-primed with Marshall Plan money--then German determination took over. The company's aggressive salesmen traveled the world to sell a full range of electronics products. Late last month, Siemens won a $75 million contract to build a nuclear power plant in Argentina--Latin America's first. In the process, it defeated such old nuclear hands as G.E. and Westinghouse.

For the Munich-based corporation, whose 1967 sales of $2 billion and profits of $40 million made it West Germany's biggest private company, the Argentine nuclear plant will be its fifth --and its first outside the country. It marks the latest foreign victory for an expansionist-minded organization with 95 subsidiaries that include a cable factory in India and a railway-switchgear plant in South Africa. When the company built a hydroelectric plant in Afghanistan, it not only trained mechanics in Germany to run the operation but also erected the electrical and telephone system powered by the plant. Its 300 series computer runs steel mills in Red China, and its electromedical equipment is used by U.S. hospitals.

Siemens must export to survive; the domestic market simply will not support the company's huge research expenses, which last year amounted to $140 million. Its communications research center in Munich has 4,330 scientists; at the Erlangen lab near Nuernberg, 500 nuclear technicians made possible the Argentine generator sale. While most European firms depend upon American processes and patents, Siemens has sold $50 million more patent rights since the war than it has bought. If asked about the so-called technology gap between Europe and the U.S., Erwin Hachmann, 55, a member of Siemens' three-man ruling presidium, says: "Ach Quatsch!" (Ah baloney!)

Research, in fact, has been the keystone of the company ever since 1847, when Werner Siemens founded a telegraphy workshop in Berlin. "The future of this factory," said Siemens, "depends upon its own inventions." Nineteen years later, he developed the modern electric dynamo; in 1928 the Siemens company built the first telex machine and still later, the first telex network.

Siemens prides itself on being only in the electrical business. "But we cover its whole spectrum," says Presidium Member Dr. Gerd Tacke. His is no idle boast. As usual, Siemens promised its Argentine customers everything from a permanent school for technicians in Germany to aid in exploiting the Argentine's natural uranium.

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