The Year Ahead: Neil Corner – An active market

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For the New Year, we already see some encouraging signals from the market.

We’ve started to see more movement in markets that have been inactive for a while as well as new developing markets such as countries that require fast, distributed power.

We believe our small gas turbines built in Lincoln are well sized for such markets.

Our service business should also see some recovery this year. Overall, we remain competitive supported by the weak pound and, therefore, we are more optimistic for 2017.

However, the oil price is expected to remain low so we will continue to focus on cost control and productivity across our business to ensure we remain competitive and can offer competitive products for our customers.

A key enabler for productivity is innovation, and the new digital world will play a key part in innovation in our factory, processes and products.

We will continue to drive our digitalisation program, and this will bring change to a number of areas of our business in 2017.

We see this change all around us in our personal lives, either shopping or passing through airports for example. The digital world will drive the biggest changes in our business next year and going forward.

Our biggest challenge will be changing at the pace that is required.

Our team at Siemens will be central to managing this change and, for long term sustainability, we need a continuous talent feed and we have worked hard to build this over recent years, and 2017 will be no different.

We will continue our successful collaboration with the University of Lincoln and Lincoln Technical College to attract young talented people into engineering through our apprenticeship and graduate schemes. We are also working with local schools to inspire the next generation of engineers in STEM subjects.

In summary we are looking forward to the year ahead, with exciting change as we embrace the digital world across our business. Our expectation for 2017 is for business growth in an improving market.