>a few important German companies in the IT sector (or related): Siemens, Infineon, Deutsche Telekom, Bechtle, TeamViewer come to my mind.

None of them famous or being praised by customers for having amazing UI/UX though, because they're not consumer products, they're targeting engineers who either don't care about UX, or don't have a choice in the matter because their company is buying it, not them.

Cars on the other hand ARE consumer products and do need great UX, and German companies long forgot how to do that since they operate everything as a cost center and outsource everything they perceive ads no value.

>the strength of German industry is not pure software, but high-tech machinery

Yeah but there's more margins in pure software and more buyers in the world for consumer devices than for high tech machinery. Apple can probably buy all of Germany's machine tool makers if they wanted to. It's the perk of selling to 7 billion consumers in the world.

> the stocks of its spin-off Siemens Energy have risen by ~700 % in the last 3 years.

Just like every energy and defense stock in the world right now, but that's to be expected and somewhat offtopic for SW and UX.

If we look at some of their other consumer and healthcare spin-offs like Gigaset or Healthineers, they are doing insanely poor, which is embarrassing.

They havent totally forgotten. I drove a 2025 BMW last week and noticed many similarities to my favorite car, the '92 325IS. The speedo and tach both aligned in top gear, the thumb hooks were still perfect, and the cluster still dimmed enough for night driving. Someone at BMW still remembers how to do UI.