Bosch Expects Big Things from its Software Division

Bosch announced it would expand its business with software and services. By the end of the decade, the company wants to generate sales running into the billions with software.

“For quite some time now, Bosch has also been a software company,” said Stefan Hartung, chairman of the Bosch board of management, at the Bosch Tech Day 2024 in Renningen. “Across the company, our extensive domain expertise allows us to put lines of code directly into products. The software in our products is technology that is ‘Invented for life,’ improving our customers’ lives.”

Bosch software is already to be found in many areas, including the production lines of major industrial enterprises, many car repair shops, and medical equipment. It alerts drivers to cars on the wrong side of the road, protects valuable assets, controls building technology, and has worked in outer space, on the ISS. All in all, 48,000 associates work as software programmers at Bosch, 42,000 of them in the Mobility business sector alone.

“The triumphant march of software will fundamentally revolutionize the automotive industry,” Hartung said. “In the future, cars will be seamlessly integrated into the digital world. As a result, they will be one thing more than anything else – updateable,” added Markus Heyn, member of the board of management of Bosch and chairman of the Mobility business sector. Cars will then get new functions not by visiting a repair shop, but via a convenient software update over the air. “Bosch technology will mean that cars grow older more slowly,” said Heyn.

Software and digital services have now become the mainstays of business success at Bosch. “To exploit the huge potential of software and AI, we need partnerships of equals. Barely any company can manage this on its own. In this context, open-source software offers an especially useful way of pooling expertise across company boundaries, of saving costs, and of creating standardized solutions,” Hartung said.