We also want to grow at twice the rate of the global gross domestic product in the future. To do this, we will benefit over the long term from four megatrends: demographic change, urbanization, climate change and globalization. We will achieve sustainable growth by taking advantage of the many business opportunities arising from these challenges. Growth without profitability is not sustainable, which is why we have set ourselves ambitious best-in-class margin ranges for all our businesses which we want to achieve by 2010 at the latest.

To foster excellent leadership, we have developed the Siemens Leadership Excellence Program (SLE), which enables managers to set visions and clear goals for the company and to have a major impact on the development of their people. We have established binding standards throughout the company through the performance management process. To safe-guard our long-term future, we have strengthened our focus on the next generation - in particular, on young top talents and key experts.

We have clearly defined our portfolio priorities. Our first priority is on organic growth since we want to maintain a strict allocation of resources in the future. Over the past five years, we have invested over €20 billion in growth acquisitions, which play a key role in helping to achieve our goal of growing at twice the rate of the global economy. We will also continue to adjust our portfolio to our new three-sector structure: Industry, Energy and Healthcare. At the same time, selective investments in portfolio enhancement and expansion must meet strict financial requirements and keep in line with our overall goal of increasing the total value of Siemens over the long term.

We want to continue our 160-year tradition of setting technology trends, developing pioneering innovations through the effective use of worldwide internal and external networks of innovation and providing our customers with decisive competitive advantages. And here we are of course thinking globally: we are expanding our global market presence and market penetration, especially in rapidly growing regions such as Asia. This is precisely the goal that the top+ SMART initiative is helping us to achieve – enhancement of our own competitive advantages and exploitation of the potential of all markets, also in the lower level segment. Our global, optimized network for value creation also enables us to operate with an efficient cost structure, which makes us successful on international markets.

We aim to set standards – in order to clearly assign internal responsibility, achieve transparency in reporting and maintain high standards of integrity. We make effective contributions to climate protection through our product and solution portfolio and our in-house environmental protection work. We plan to continue and intensify the worldwide rollout of our two company-wide corporate citizenship programs – Siemens Generation21 for education and Siemens Caring Hands for social assistance.