“Another fantastic year”: Software giant SAP raises outlook again

The software manufacturer SAP is raising its outlook for 2021 again.

The company is slightly above expectations in the second quarter.

Walldorf - Europe's largest software manufacturer, SAP, is more confident about the year as a whole in view of its customers' faster transition to the cloud: "We had another fantastic quarter," said company boss Christian Klein to journalists on Wednesday.

The Walldorf-based Dax group has therefore raised its outlook for the year as a whole for the second time.

According to this, the group now expects an operating profit adjusted for currency effects of between 7.95 and 8.25 billion euros.

That would still be slightly below the result of 2020, when the company had still achieved 8.28 billion euros operationally.

But the new target is noticeably above the previous forecast for the current year of 7.8 to 8.2 billion euros.

SAP: strong cloud growth

In the second quarter, total sales in the past quarter were 6.7 billion euros, one percent below the previous year's figure. Adjusted operating profit, with a decline of two percent to 1.92 billion euros, was slightly better than analysts had anticipated. Without the effect of the exchange rate, sales and operating profit would have increased by three percent. Klein also referred to strong growth in new contracts for the new “Rise with SAP” cloud offering, especially in the USA.

The bottom line was that SAP earned 1.45 billion euros, almost two thirds more than a year earlier. Once again, SAP's investments in start-ups through the venture capital vehicle Sapphire Ventures, which according to CFO Luka Mucic contributed 900 million euros to the financial result in the second quarter alone, played a decisive role.