Siemens AG expects its enterprise communications business revenue in China to grow about 30 percent in the next fiscal year ended on October 31, 2008, the German-based firm said yesterday in Shanghai.

 

Siemens attributed the high growth in China to the demand in power, transport and government sectors and a newly-launched product which can be fully integrated with other vendors' equipment, said Roland Bernshaus, president and chief executive of Shanghai-based Siemens Business Communication Systems.

 

Siemens declined to reveal SBCS's latest data for the fiscal year ended last month. SBCS generated revenue of 430 million yuan (US$57.3 million) in China in the year ended on October 31, 2006, a jump of 34 percent from the previous year.

 

Siemens has launched unified communications products for enterprises including HiPath 8000, which can work as a pure software platform integrated with equipment provided by other vendors like Cisco or TCL.

 

Rivals, like Cisco and Nortel, have similar products but their clients have to buy the package of both software and hardware, industry insiders said.

 

"Siemens' software business, as many people may not know, may have the larger scale compared with Microsoft. But as our products are not on PC, they are not known by the public," said Bernshaus.

 

For example, Siemens' software is used in various forms from the magnetic levitation train system in Shanghai, intelligent washing machines to airline management systems, Bernshaus said.

 

Globally, Siemens sold 450,000 software licenses in 2007 and income from orders accounted for 10 percent of its enterprise communications division. The figure is likely to hit 15 percent, according to Mark Straton, Siemens Communications' senior vice president.

 

"The emergence and promotion of UC will propel the development of enterprise IP telephony equipment and the overall market," Milly Xiang, analyst at IDC, said in a recent report.

 

(Shanghai Daily November 15, 2007)