Germany's Siemens said it aims to save $7.65 billion as the engineering outfit tried to stay competitive as the global economy tanks.

Siemens said it will improve its margin on operating profit from its four core businesses to at least 12 percent from 9.5 percent last year, as it reported quarterly earnings that were slightly better than expected.

Part of its cunning plan is to buy Belgian industry software maker LMS International for about 680 million euros and sell its water businesses with annual sales of about 1 billion euros.

All this will provide the company with more savings than it expected.