Speaking following a press report in the Financial Times (May 3), Mark Jackson, head of vertical for food and beverage industry at Siemens UK, told our sister publication Food Manufacture: “Food and beverage is absolutely core, along with automotive and aerospace … Food and beverage is second behind automotive in terms of our global business.”
The Financial Times had reported that Siemens was exiting some “non-core” activities in baggage handling and water treatment following the publication of its results for the second quarter of the 2013 financial year last week (May 2) in which it cut its sales forecasts for its global activities, including those in its main areas of trains, gas turbines and power transmission.
‘Selling water treatment solutions business’
“Yes, we’re selling the water treatment business in terms of the solutions business. But we are still selling and promoting technology,” said Jackson.
Jackson said Siemens planned to further strengthen its presence in the food and beverage sector, where it believes it can add value and help manufacturers to implement cost effective solutions to improve their competitiveness. This would involve it getting closer to its customer base, he added.
“We have got to put more focus and tailor solutions to these vertical markets,” he said. “As a company we are investing more research and development into building solutions which are tailored more to the market rather than being a standard product or technology vendor.”
Jackson added:“The food and beverage business in the UK is a big part of our business – it is one of the largest.”
Challenges facing food manufacturers
He said Siemens recognised the challenges facing UK’s food manufacturers, with rising raw materials and energy cost, together with difficulties in passing costs on to retail customers.
“In general we are trying to make our clients’ production processes more efficient,” he said. “We are working with them to identify areas for improvement by providing automation technologies.”
However, compared with other parts of Europe, the UK was “still relatively a low investor in automation technology”, he added.
He put this down to a number of reasons, including the shortage of engineering and technology skills within the UK’s food sector itself. “That’s why we’ve got a job to do as a technology partner for these clients to really demonstrate the return on investment [ROI] because a lot of companies don’t unfortunately see automation technologies as being the` way to drive productivity – or maybe they do but they are cautious about the ROI,” he said.
See the June issue of Food Manufacture for a report on automation in the food and drink manufacturing sector, with more comments from Jackson.