1984 was a leap year and also the year Germany-based industrial group Siemens leapt into corporate venturing, making it one of the longest-established units in the world – this year it exceeded €1bn ($1.3bn) in assets under management.
Siemens Venture Capital has three investment platforms. Initially it made only classic direct venture investments funded from the balance sheet.
Later it was approached by the trustees of the Siemens pension trust in Germany and asked to create a private equity asset management fund.
Finally, in 2009, this internal money was leveraged with external institutional money to create a third platform, Siemens Global Innovation Partners, a fund of funds.
The direct investment operation, which currently has 26 portfolio companies in the energy and clean-tech, industry, infrastructure and cities, and healthcare sectors, is the only one of the three platforms to have strategic objectives.
Ralf Schnell (pictured), chief executive of Siemens Venture Capital, who we named the fifth most powerful person in corporate venturing in our Powerlist last month, said: “We do not try to measure performance against strategic objectives. What is important is business alignment.
“The true measure of our strategic worth is internal customer satisfaction – if the business units continue to give us money then we are doing our jobs properly. We spend as much time networking internally as we do externally – there are 28,000 employees in research and development alone.”
The group takes a top-down approach to deal origination, first polling internal business units about the type of technologies of interest and then screening these for their suitability for venture models. It then identifies interesting companies in each technology sector, typically around 100, often cold-calling them. A shortlist of 30 are invited to “venture days”, where the entrepreneurs, Siemens staff, venturers and others involved in that niche sector interact.
“The aim is not necessarily to invest immediately in these companies – in fact probably not,” said Schnell, “but to start to build a relationship with them.”
Around 2,000 companies are screened each year. Schnell added: “Looking back in our history, Siemens sometimes does acquire the company. We have a little more than 170 companies with less than 10% acquired by Siemens so far. We are not looking at deals as precursors for mergers and acquisitions, but it sometimes happens the business relationship is so tight we decide it is something we want to have completely.”
The venture unit has offices in the US, Germany and China. Although officesin Israel and India were closed over the past four years, Schnell would consider opening other new offices if there was a business case. “We are regionally agnostic – we are more concerned with the technology and the industry space,” he said.
He believes in hiring locally, sometimes from within Siemens but more often people with a venture capital background.
Schnell sees future opportunities for technologies dealing with complexities caused by increased urbanisation, demographic shifts and climate change.
One example is personalised medicine, which requires deep mining of genomic data. He said: “I have a problem with the term ‘disruptive technology’ because it does not help me. You only know if something has been truly disruptive 10 years down the line. What I am interested in is, given the ubiquity and globalisation of technology, what is out there that can solve a customer’s problems and is also different from anything else available. That is exciting.”
Siemens Technology Accelerator
As well as Siemens Venture Capital, Siemens also has an independent unit that interacts with venture capital – Siemens Technology Accelerator, which is part of Siemens Corporate Technology.
Christian Wiesinger, chief financial officer of Siemens Technology Accelerator, said: “We are exclusively focused on commercialising Siemens non-core technologies via spin-offs, licensing or sale. We are closely related to the Siemens corporate research group which is our main deal source.”
Wiesinger added: “We provide start-up financing typically in the range of €500,000. It is our goal to build new companies together with other parties who share the risk but also the opportunities with us. So we have to bring other investors to the table who provide significantfinanceto bring the spin-off further down the road.
“After a substantial series A round we are often still a significantshareholder but do not control the company any more. We manage our dilution over time and eventually take a more passive approach.”
The accelerator is taking a long-term approach. Wiesinger said: “We have now been in business more than 10 years and have built a pretty balanced portfolio of technology companies.
“We have not exited so many investments as we start at the very early end and truly build companies from scratch. But we have made significant technology sales and earned significant revenues from this.”
He added: “We are flexible in our approach. When we decide to sell a technology, typically cash is preferred. By contrast when we decide to go for a spin-off, we initially receive only shares and do not pull out any cash from the company but go for the investing upside. Sometimes we combine both approaches and negotiate a transaction payable as a combination of cash and shares or other instruments.”
The company has already found commercialisation of Siemens’ non-core technologies can lead to less than optimum results, despite promising starts.
Wiesinger said: “In hindsight you are always smarter. In one project we sold a solar technology for a combination of cash, unsecured debt and shares. It took off phenomenally but has since deteriorated, and ultimately the company had to filefor Chapter 11 [US bankrupty protection]. We would have been better off negotiating a smaller total price in cash only.”