Last year our company was bought by Siemens – our third merger/buyout in six years. Besides changing my email sig and seeing a different logo on my pay check stubs I wouldn’t really notice a difference. Sure, there’s new benefits plans to enroll in and I had to make tons of changes to our web site, but really it’s business as usual. It was only this week that our building signage got changed.
What’s really mind boggling though is how massive the entire company is. There’s over 450,000 of us cogs running the Siemens machine. According to Forbes we are the 6th largest employer in the world; just ahead of McDonald’s. For reference, IBM is 18th and GE is 27th. In all the company brought in somewhere in the neighborhood of 72 billion Euros in 2007. That’s like $107B. They were 28th in the Forbes 2007 Global 500, and if they were US owned they’d be in the Fortune 500 top 10. The company is doing well, profits are up, and job security is good.
The company just underwent a restructuring and is now comprised of three main sectors: Energy, Industry, and Healthcare. We’re buried in the bowels of the Industry division – which brings in over half of the company’s annual revenue. But wait, the rabbit hole goes deeper. Within industry there are six divisions. We fall under the large Industry Automation division. And down from there we have all the levels of the company that existed before the acquisition. I’m something like seven levels down from there. I’ve never seen a full org chart from top to bottom, but it’d be dizzying. Looking up at all the corporate levels above me gives me the same sense of vertigo as standing in the center of a huge atrium.
