Two companies lead the world in big gas turbines. Both split off from famous old conglomerates and kept the family name. Both sell grid gear, both have a wind business with a messy past, and both bring in about the same revenue. One is up 25% this year. The other is down 1.4%. Jinjoo Lee at Heard on the Street says the gap makes little sense.
GE Vernova (GEV) is the AI trade’s clear winner among the machine makers. Siemens Energy (ENR on the Frankfurt exchange) is its near twin. Each has booked about 150 gigawatts of firm gas-turbine orders since 2016, by BloombergNEF’s count. Yet Siemens Energy’s market value is about half of GE Vernova’s. Price it on forward earnings, the profit analysts expect next year, and Siemens sells for about 19 times that. That’s a 42% discount to its American rival. European stocks do trade cheaper. The Stoxx Europe 600 Industrials index is about 16% cheaper than the S&P 500 Industrials. That explains some of the gap. It doesn’t explain most of it.
The drag is history. Siemens Energy bought the Spanish wind-turbine maker Gamesa and struggled to fix it. The wind unit’s losses topped out near $4.7 billion in 2023. The company took government-backed help and couldn’t pay dividends for a few years. A profit warning that year “really hit investor confidence,” says HSBC’s Sean McLoughlin. Management turned cautious and stayed that way. GE Vernova, meanwhile, got very good at telling its story.
What the orders say
The numbers now favor the quiet one. From 2025 through June, Siemens booked 54.3 gigawatts of firm gas-turbine orders, 15% more than GE Vernova. Its small and mid-size turbines are faster to install than the giant frames. It beat its own 2025 revenue guidance by 14%, while GE Vernova beat by 4.3%. Its margins have been higher than GE Vernova’s for two quarters. Last quarter the wind unit finally stopped losing money, for the first time since 2022. Both companies plan to pay out at least a third of their cash flow. GE Vernova reports earnings this week. Siemens lays out its 2030 goals next month, and it’ll probably sound modest again. Lee’s last line is the keeper. Returns “come from business performance, not storytelling abilities.”
Our read
This is Investments and Risk (IN04). We own GE Vernova in 30 books, at weight, and nothing was added this edition. Nothing changes because of this column. The lesson is about price. The same business can carry two very different price tags, and a big part of the difference is how well each company talks. Over time, results matter more than the pitch. Owners of the expensive twin should at least know the cheap one exists. GE Vernova closed at $895.08 on Tuesday.
The one concrete thing in your plan is the power-builder slice. GE Vernova sits next to Vertiv, Quanta and the utilities in a lot of our books, and they’ve all run hard this year. The one check this week is to see how big that group has grown as a share of your stock money, since winners grow their own weight. If it’s past the size you’d choose on purpose, that’s your umbrella to inspect before the sky turns.