Helping Siemens Energy to keep delivering

Siemens Energy makes heavy-duty equipment that powers everyday life across Europe and beyond. As the company puts it, it provides large-scale energy infrastructure - including gas turbines, steam turbines, generators and wind turbines.

What challenges did Siemens Energy face?

These projects take time to build and deliver. Customers often need confidence that suppliers will deliver on time and to contract, even when timelines run for months or years. That’s where bank guarantees come in.

Siemens Energy’s VP of Guarantees and Documentary Instruments, Andreas Meier, puts it plainly: “Without advance payment and performance guarantees, it is essentially impossible for us to book an order with a customer. There are no ifs and buts.”

He adds they are “the lifeblood of our order execution”.

In 2023, that lifeblood was under pressure. Following the acquisition of the majority shares in Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy (Wind Power today), Siemens Energy found serious technical issues in some onshore wind turbine models. Fixing this meant significant cash outflows and reserves.

With uncertainty rising, Siemens Energy saw access tighten: “Some banks froze their credit or their guarantee lines for us.”

At the same time, demand for new energy infrastructure remained strong. Siemens Energy faced a critical question, as HSBC’s Managing Director of Global Industry Vasilka Shishkova describes it: “How do we ensure operational continuity without necessarily sacrificing the momentum?”

What was the solution?

A number of Siemens Energy’s international banking partners, including HSBC, worked alongside the German government to put a new arrangement in place. The result was a “one-of-a-kind €11bn guarantee framework”.

As Vasilka explains, “the German government essentially did provide a counter guarantee to these banks”, helping “increase the appetite for underwriting Siemens Energy risk”.

Result: guarantees issued, business momentum maintained

For Siemens Energy, the impact was immediate. As Andreas said: “It helped us to immediately issue those much-needed guarantees again.”

“Our order book kept growing. We were able to issue guarantees of the government-backed facility.”

When major infrastructure depends on long lead times, confidence matters. This case shows how collaboration between industry, banks and government can help keep vital projects moving - even in a tough moment.

Watch or listen to find out more.

In this video podcast episode, HSBC’s Kai Fehr speaks with Andreas Meier of Siemens Energy about how a “never waste a crisis” mindset helped the company navigate a demanding period, build resilience, and ultimately contribute to the creation of a risk-sharing framework involving a global consortium and the German government.