Siemens is winning enterprise customers off its rivals and says delivery, not the sale, is why

Siemens is converting customers from competitors across Asia's shipyards, fabs and battery plants, betting that a US$25 billion acquisition run has bought it something rivals can't match: the ability to actually go live.

Every enterprise software vendor claims it wins on technology. Bas Kuper thinks most of them are misreading why customers actually switch, and that the real contest starts only after the contract is signed.

"It's not your selling, it is successfully implementing and going live," said Kuper, senior vice president and managing director for Asia Pacific at Siemens Digital Industries Software, at the sidelines of Realize LIVE Asia-Pacific in Bengaluru. "Customers have had many experiences where they were promised a lot, but at the end of the day, when it came to delivery, that didn't match what they thought it was at the very beginning."

It is a pointed diagnosis, and Siemens is converting a run of customers off its competitors on the strength of it. The most striking is HD Hyundai. The world's largest shipbuilder tore out its existing design and manufacturing software and moved across wholesale. "They literally bought everything we have," Kuper said, from the design tool NX to Teamcenter to the low-code platform Mendix and the AI tools of RapidMiner.

The case for switching

The reason HD Hyundai moved, as Kuper tells it, was not any single tool but the seam between two of them. The shipbuilder's existing setup kept design and manufacturing in separate systems; closing that gap, Kuper argued, is what shortens time to market and takes out cost.

"We are one of the only providers that can build the end-to-end solutions," he said. What changed, in his account, is which side of the house drives the decision. "Where in the past the decision was mostly made on the design side, now manufacturing is driving this," he said, pushing customers toward a single digital thread running the length of the lifecycle.

That is a specific claim a rival would contest, and it rests on the breadth Siemens has spent heavily to assemble. Which is where the money comes in.

What US$25 billion was meant to buy

Siemens Digital Industries Software has spent roughly US$25 billion on acquisitions, a pace that has quickened in recent years, and Kuper positions that spending as the thing rivals are now scrambling to copy. His reading of the competitive map is worth setting out, because it explains why he thinks the switching is structural rather than lucky.

Siemens moved early and unusually, buying an EDA company, Mentor Graphics, in 2017, when no vendor of PLM software–the product lifecycle management systems that track a product from design through manufacturing to service==had reached into chip design. Now, Kuper argued, the traffic is running the other way, with electronic design automation firms buying up simulation to broaden out. The two largest bets bear him out. Synopsys closed its roughly US$35 billion acquisition of Ansys in July 2025; Cadence completed its purchase of Hexagon's design and engineering arm, which houses MSC Software, for about US$3.16 billion in February 2026. Both deals fold heavyweight simulation into an EDA base.

Kuper's contention is that they stop there. "They don't have the rest of the capabilities. It's just simulation," he said. "They don't have the PLM, the lifecycle management solutions. They don't have the manufacturing solutions. So you see that some of them are trying to replicate what we've done, but they cannot do it to the full extent." The differentiator he is selling is not any one product but the span of the portfolio, what he calls the most holistic digital twin, across design, simulation, manufacturing execution and lifecycle management.

He is candid that owning the pieces is not the same as fusing them. "It's not as easy as it seems, because when you want to achieve the digital thread, that means you have to integrate this all into your current technology, which is a big effort." That admission matters: the integration burden is precisely the risk a customer weighs before committing, and it is the same burden Siemens' rivals now shoulder with their own recent purchases.

The regional read

For Asia Pacific, Kuper's map of where the growth sits is more textured than a single semiconductor story. Electronics and semiconductors are one engine. Battery manufacturing is another, and a large one, with roughly 70% of the world's cell production in Asia and much of it in China; he named CATL and BYD among customers. Aerospace work is running in Japan around new aircraft programs. And shipbuilding has become a strength Siemens built by acquisition, buying Spain's FORAN in 2021 to add speed for high-volume commercial vessels to a marine capability previously suited to complex one-offs like submarines and luxury yachts.

The semiconductor thread runs closest to Southeast Asia. Siemens has long sold manufacturing execution systems, the shop-floor software that runs and tracks production, into the region's fabs through Camstar, the MES vendor it acquired in 2014 that serves both semiconductor and medical-device makers. That installed base, Kuper said, is now a foothold as Siemens pushes into semiconductor lifecycle management, a template atop Teamcenter aimed at the PLM side of chip companies.

He pointed to wins including Samsung's semiconductor arm and Japan's Rapidus, and to customers moving off incumbent tools they had grown unhappy with. Malaysia sits inside that shift: number two in the world for semiconductor manufacturing, back-end heavy, and, in Kuper's view, one of Southeast Asia's frontrunners trying to climb the value chain while Vietnam and Thailand remain weighted toward manufacturing.

Where the pitch meets its limits

The most useful part of the conversation was where Kuper conceded friction. Asked about the real bottleneck to adoption in the region, he did not reach for talent or hardware. "It's the change management or the organizational transformation that the companies have to go through," he said. "It's not a technology question. It is how I get my people to think differently." He described a customer that had a strike the previous week over a plan to pilot humanoid robots, a reminder that the barrier to the digital thread is often human, not technical.

He also made a broader argument about data that doubles as a swipe at a fashionable approach. Throwing engineering data into a data lake, he said, strips out exactly what makes it valuable: the security model governing who can see and change what, which matters acutely for defence customers, and the live relationships between design, manufacturing and performance.

"Engineering data is very dynamic," he said. "When you put it in a data lake, you're basically taking a snapshot of what it was at that point in time. But the moment you look at it, it's already outdated." He recounted, without naming the customer, a European account concluding after a Siemens demonstration that it no longer needed a general-purpose data platform for that engineering work, a claim worth treating as his characterization rather than an independent finding, but a telling one about how he is positioning the pitch.

None of these settles whether Siemens' breadth is a durable moat, or a head start its rivals will close with their own integration work. What it does show is a company converting that breadth into wins now, and an executive willing to name both the strategy behind it and the friction still in the way. "I think we'll have a lot of good news going forward," Kuper said. "There will be some big announcements."