Siemens Shuffles Top Deck

Siemens AG (NYSE: SI; Frankfurt: SIE) announced a major reshuffle of its board today, including a new president for telecom unit Siemens Communications Group , which is currently under the merger and acquisition spotlight. (See Sources: Lucent, Nokia in Play for Siemens and Siemens Changes Board).

At Com, president Thomas Ganswindt will be replaced by Eduardo Montes Pérez, currently head of Siemens Spain. Siemens says Ganswindt was only a temporary president who "had taken on this additional responsibility for an interim period and will now concentrate again on his function as member of the Corporate Executive Committee."

He took the helm when previous president Lothar Pauly jumped ship to join Deutsche Telekom AG (NYSE: DT). (See Siemens Makes Exec Change.)

The new Com president-elect, 54-year-old Eduardo Montes Pérez, has been managing Siemens Spain since 1999, having joined the company in 1994. He had previously been with Siemens between 1975 and 1983.

Siemens says the changes will be proposed at a board meeting on April 26 and, subject to approval, implemented on May 1. Heinz-Joachim Neubürger has quit as CFO, to be replaced by Joe Kaeser, while CTO Claus Weyrich is making way for Hermann Requardt.

The news sent Siemens's share price down €1.00, more than 1 percent, to €75.32 on the Frankfurst exchange.

Nomura Securities telecom analyst Richard Windsor regards this as the latest step towards the divestiture of the Communications unit. He believes Siemens has been looking to sell the group for some time and would prefer to offload the whole unit to a new owner or into a separate entity, such as a joint venture, rather than dismantle it piecemeal to a number of interested parties.

— Ray Le Maistre, International News Editor, Light Reading