The healthcare division of German industrial conglomerate Siemens (NYSE:SI) helped drive a nearly 70% profit surge during its fiscal 3rd quarter, with Siemens Healthcare posting a 17.0% sales increase and a whopping 4,850% bottom-line gain.

Siemens Healthcare posted profits of €396 million ($501.5 million) on sales of €3.34 billion ($4.23 billion) during the 3 months ended June 30.

Siemens itself reported Q3 profits of €850 million ($1.08 billion), or €0.94 per share, on sales of €19.54 billion ($24.75 billion).

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That’s a bottom-line gain of 69.7% and top-line growth of 9.5%, compared with Q3 2011.

Siemens said the gains came despite a worsening economic climate.

"The deceleration of the world economy has increased in the past few months. We see growing reluctance among our customers regarding capital expenditures and stronger economic headwinds, especially in our industrial short-cycle businesses," according to a regulatory filing. "Given our results for the first nine months, including substantially lower earnings than we expected in our industrial short-cycle businesses, it has become clearly more ambitious to reach the range of our mid-year outlook of €5.2 [billion] to €5.4 billion in income from continuing operations."

Siemens shares initially slipped 0.01% last week on the news, but regained that and more today with the announcement of a €100 million tram-system order from Qatar. SI shares were trading at $85.18 today on Wall Street as of about 11:15 a.m., up 1.9%.