The Siemens Healthcare turnaround, dubbed the "Siemens Vision 2020" strategy, is looking hard for deals to add to its long-term bottom line.

“We are definitely hungry, but not for the sake of growth... but when it fits into the strategy we have laid out,” the division’s CEO Bernd Montag said at an ECR press conference. However, any future mergers and acquisitions, he noted, will be a “means to an end” for Siemens Healthcare.

Part of that goal is to further the division's legal separation from the parent company, the CEO told Reuters.
Siemens' Vision 2020 has repositioned the firm in the face of a shifting economic and political world, according to the CEO of Siemens AG, Joe Kaeser.

"Our decision to make health care a company in the company, to make it much more focused and stronger, has already been paying off. So what we actually want to do is to make a good business into a great business," Kaeser told CNBC recently.

"We are strong, we are winning market share and… we are very well prepared for anything which we believe needs to be done to make this business an even greater business for Siemens."

Kaeser tapped Montag last year to top the health care unit as part of a larger executive shuffle, reported Bloomberg. The pick was part of a move to give the division more internal independence.

Independence would allow for more flexibility in the fast-moving global health arena as Kaeser focused more on the energy business. Kaeser also granted the division greater operational freedom — which some saw as the beginning of a long-term plan to divest the business or spin off a standalone health care company.

“We are now setting up health care as a separately managed business within Siemens in order to pave the way for an equally successful future in a highly dynamic market and innovation-driven environment,” Kaeser said in the statement at the time.

Siemens Healthcare has pushed ahead with a number of technologies in the past year. It gained FDA approval of its SOMATOM CT systems for the “most expansive indication” for lung cancer screening, and got clearance as well for the Multitom Robotic X-ray System, which uses ultrasound and MR for biopsies.

The health care division has also been contributing to the company's bottom line. "The real economy in China is a lot better than people are talking about right now. There is obviously some weakness in terms of real estate and the finance sector but as far as our business is concerned, we do see some decent growth in health care, which was very, very strong with double-digit growth in China," Kaeser told CNBC.

Kaeser also stated that Siemens Q1 net profit was up 42 percent and that it was raising full-year guidance. “If we hadn’t been confident about what we do we would not have raised the forecast at a time which people obviously think to be a bit early,” Kaeser told Bloomberg in January. “We have a lot of self-help potential” to achieve 2020 growth targets, he said.

The company's Q1 report noted that health care financials had been driven by three main factors:

• Order and revenue increases resulted mainly from the diagnostic imaging business with exceptionally high double- digit growth.


• All regions contributed to volume growth; strong order and revenue increases in China.


• Profit growth due mainly to a strong earnings performance from the diagnostic imaging business; profit also benefited from currency tailwinds.

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