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SAP headquarters in Walldorf: Analysts disappointed with the outlook
Photo: Uwe Anspach / dpa
The withdrawal from Russia and higher spending on research and development caused SAP to lose profits last year.
Europe's largest software house therefore announced on Thursday that it wanted to cut up to 3,000 jobs.
This corresponds to around 2.5 percent of the workforce and is part of a concentration on the core business, said company boss Christian Klein.
In addition, SAP is considering selling its majority stake in the data analysis company Qualtrics.
The operating result fell in 2022 currency-adjusted by seven percent to 8.03 billion euros, as SAP further announced.
The net profit even collapsed by 39 percent to 4.08 euros per share.
Here the weaker financial result of the venture capital division Sapphire Ventures additionally burdened.
In contrast, the promising cloud business once again grew strongly.
Here, currency-adjusted sales increased by 24 percent to 12.556 billion euros in 2022.
Group revenues increased by five percent to 30.871 billion euros.
In the fourth quarter, these indicators increased by 22 percent to EUR 3.392 billion and by one percent to EUR 8.436 billion.
Operating profit increased two percent to 2.581 billion euros at the end of the year, after having fallen by eight percent in the previous quarter.
Hoping for the cloud business
"We are very confident as we enter 2023 that we will deliver on our promise to deliver accelerated revenue growth and double-digit operating income growth," Klein said.
For the current year, he predicted a currency-adjusted increase in cloud sales by 22 to 25 percent to 15.3 to 15.7 billion euros.
An increase of ten to 13 percent to 8.8 to 9.1 billion euros is expected for operating profit.
The proportion of sales that can be planned more easily will rise to 83 percent.
In the past year it had risen by four percentage points to 79 percent.
The business figures for the past year were largely in line with expectations, said a broker.
The fly in the ointment, however, is the slightly weaker than expected growth of the cloud division.
The view is also a bit disappointing.
SAP shares were hardly changed before the market.
SAP also announced that it would consider selling its stake in Qualtrics.
The Walldorf group took over the data analysis company in 2018 for eight billion dollars and took it public in 2021.
The aim is to sell the entire stake of currently around 71 percent, said CFO Luka Mucic.
However, the process is still at a very early stage.
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