Biography | Roland Busch — Given the Mass Transit Chair Back in This Town

People remember the Shanghai years as the moment he became a chief.

The next dated chair brought him home to rail.

From 2005 to 2007 Roland Busch served as president and CEO of Siemens VDO Automotive Asia Pacific in Shanghai.

That is the first chief-executive title on the official curriculum.

In 2007 the same curriculum puts him back in Erlangen as head of the Mass Transit Division inside Siemens Transportation Systems.

The Munich Re filing repeats the place: Siemens AG, Erlangen.

Transportation Systems was the group's rail business, later gathered under Siemens Mobility, which still names Erlangen as its home base.

This pin is the public Siemens Campus address at Siemenspromenade 10, on the former research ground where Mobility, Digital Industries, and Smart Infrastructure now sit together.

The 2007 office was not this rebuilt promenade.

It belonged to the older closed campus and to the inner-city blocks the company later emptied.

The visitor should not hunt for a brass plate from that year.

The Mass Transit year is short and specific.

In 2008 he left the division for Corporate Strategies and Corporate Development in Munich, the move that put him on the path to the managing board in 2011.

Erlangen therefore bookends the early career twice: the 1994 research badge and the 2007 rail chair.

Between them sits the Shanghai automotive posting.

After them sits Munich.

A physicist who started in the town's laboratories came back to run trains from the same city before the company asked him to think about the whole firm.

Photo: Hans-Rudi der Letzte, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Siemens Portugal, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.