OREANDA-NEWS. July 17, 2015. Products offered in China have to fulfill five requirements. They have to be simple, easy to maintain, affordable, reliable, and quickly available on the market. This realization inspired CT China to develop the SMART program six years ago. SMART stands for Simple, Maintenance-friendly, Affordable, Reliable, Time to market. “Siemens has doubled its SMART product portfolio in China in the last two years and we definitely have to do more,” says R?ckl. Knowledge gained from the Chinese market is now also flowing into solutions for other markets, such as India and Brazil. CT scanners from China are also sold in these countries today.

In recent years a sixth requirement has been added to the list: mobility. Chinese customers love their smartphones. That offers an opportunity to produce surprising solutions, such as one for the traffic management system in Wuhan, where Corporate Technology is developing an app for smartphones that helps policemen guide traffic more effectively. Here too, the inspiring idea resulted from close cooperation with leading customers in China.

Thanks to SMART, Siemens has successfully met the challenges posed by the Chinese market and is doing well in most of its business areas, unlike some of its Western competitors. But that’s not a reason for the company to sit back and relax. For example, according to Corporate Technology’s Xiaoxun Zhu, quality is becoming increasingly important,. That’s normal for a mature market that is Siemens’ third-largest after the U.S. and Germany. “All the same, we have to keep our innovation tempo up to speed,” he says.