"Never Miss A Good Crisis" from Bloomberg Businessweek

Peter Löscher, 53, the head of Siemens, Germany's largest engineering company, spends as much as 70 percent of his time on the road. "It's the life of a global CEO," he says. These days more and more of his time is spent in China, where Bloomberg Businessweek met with him on the 62nd floor of the Park Hyatt in Beijing, high above the city's plush Chaoyang District.

"We are in China since 1872," says  Löscher, an Austrian with salt-and-pepper hair and the build of a former volleyball player. "We have more than 40,000 people in China, 16 R&D centers, more than 3,000 researchers. We are proud when the Chinese premier says Siemens is a Chinese company.

China's boundless appetite for clean energy is the key to  Löscher's green strategy, which is to sell every kind of technology, from trains to windmills to solar panels to building controls, that a giant like China - or Brazil, or India, or even the U.S. - could want. In a interview condensed here,  Löscher spoke on a range of topics.

History.
The compay was founded in 1847 by three brothers. One stayed in Berlin. The second went to St. Petersburg. The third one went to London. At that time these pretty much were the centers of the world. So we were founded as a global company, with one technology : the telegraph. And we moved it from Germany to Finland to Russia, to the Black Sea, across the channel, to India, and in 1872 we arrived in the United States. Engineering prowess combined with entrepreneurial spirit is our founding DNA.

Green China.
China has a very ambitious but very clear energy plan. We just deployed 1,400 kilometers [870 miles] of high-voltage direct current transmission line from Yunnan down to Guangdong, with an overall transmission loss of 5 percent.

By 2050 the target of China is to have renewable energies be 25 percent of their energy mix. As they change their energy mix, we are able to help in all areas.

The Chinese boom.
When I was studying at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1984 and I was for the first time visiting Shanghai, you saw rice fields, you saw hardly a car. In today's environment, if you take the signage away from Shanghai, it could be anywhere in the world. So the transformation of China is remarkable. Since the WTO access alone, the GDP per capita has grown 226 percent. So I have enormous respect for the changes which are happening.

Bribery scandal and turnaround.
Never miss a good crisis. And we certainly didn't miss our crisis. We are extremely proud that Siemens today is recognized today by prestigious external parties like the Dow Jones Sustainability Index as the No.1 industrial company in the world. And we always say Siemens stands for clean business, every time, always, and everywhere. So we are recognized as a leader in this field - which obviously was one major achievement.

We are communicating a record order book, the biggest order book in the history of the company. Our growth profile is significantly better than many other industrial companies. We will report record profit this year. So despite the big crisis, I am hugely proud of the performance of all 405,000 Siemens workers. And it has proven three things: We have clarity of strategy, clear direction, and we are playing to our strengths.