I probably am getting ahead of myself — in fact, I hope I am — but the epic war over the world’s placement equipment business is more and more looking like it won’t include Siemens. The Munich-based OEM, which last year put its electronics assembly business on the block, today announced another difficult quarter.

On the bright side, the placement equipment unit narrowed its first-quarter loss, but sales for Siemens’ discontinued businesses (of which electronics assembly equipment makes up the major share) for the period ended Dec. 31 fell 69% year-over-year.

Perhaps worse, the loss was €15 million on €62 million in sales. Obviously, that’s not sustainable.

I know lots of people at Siemens, and I have tremendous respect for CEO Guenter Lauber. But with only modest improvement expected in the sector this year, it doesn’t look good.