Siemens, which made a profit of €6.2 billion on revenue of €83.0 billion last year, is globally focused on its electrification, automation and digitalisation business areas. It has a current market capitalisation of about €96 billion.

The company said this week joint investment in its two-year-old strategic alliance with Bentley had been doubled to €100 million to "further accelerate" their joint business cooperation and commercial initiatives.

"In addition, as a result of the continuous investment of Siemens into secondary shares of Bentley's common stock the Siemens stake in Bentley Systems now exceeds 9%," Siemens said.

"Now we are investing in the next collaboration level with Bentley, where for instance we will strengthen their engineering and project management tools with Siemens enterprise wide collaboration platform Teamcenter to create a full Digital Twin for the engineering and construction world," said Klaus Helmrich, Siemens managing board member.

"Integrated company-wide data handling and IoT connectivity via MindSphere will enable our mutual customers to benefit from the holistic Digital Twins."

New engineering design software "powered by the digital twin" is expected to be released to the market early next year.