Siemens Hearing-Aid Limbo Gives Rivals Edge, Board Member Says
February 25, 2010, 10:22 AM EST

Feb. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Siemens AG’s possible sale of its hearing-aid unit is helping competitors because the indecision is disrupting business, an employee representative and supervisory board member said.
Munich-based Siemens, Europe’s largest engineering company, is weighing a sale of the division, and may call it off if bids fail to come in at the expected price of at least 2 billion euros ($2.7 billion), two people with knowledge of the situation said Feb. 22.
“We absolutely have no understanding for the sale of the very successful hearing instruments business,” supervisory board member Werner Moenius said by e-mail today. “Management should really shelve negotiations” that are causing concern among employees and aiding competitors, he said.
Moenius is the second member of Siemens’s supervisory board to speak out against a disposal of the division this week, after his colleague Dieter Scheitor urged management to reconsider a sale. Supervisory boards in Germany are divided evenly between employee and company representatives, and the panel’s tasks also include hiring and firing managers and setting compensation.
Siemens, whose products include high-speed trains and medical scanners, competes in hearing aids with Switzerland’s Sonova Holding AG, as well as Denmark’s William Demant Holding and GN Store Nord A/S. No decision has been made about a sale, Chief Financial Officer Joe Kaeser said last month.
A partnership of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., Hellman and Friedman LLC and Cochlear Ltd., as well as Cinven Ltd., Bain Capital LLC and a group including Permira Advisers LLP and Nordic Capital are interested in the unit, according to the people familiar with the talks, who declined to be identified because talks over the unit are private.


--Editors: Benedikt Kammel, Robert Valpuesta.

To contact the reporter on this story: Richard Weiss in Frankfurt at +49-69-92041-287 or rweiss5@bloomberg.net.