SAP
boss
Christian Klein
is supposed to free Europe's most important tech group from old problems and lead it into a bright future, but at the moment he's getting on the nerves of many in the company.
Klein is obsessed with detail and constantly interferes in things that actually need to be dealt with at lower levels, reports colleague Christina Kyriasoglou.
Anyone expecting charisma, inspiration and strategic vision from the SAP boss will be disappointed.
Instead, there are more and more outbursts of temper on Walldorf's management floors.
And on top of that, when selecting personnel, Klein is all too often guided by personal contacts instead of objective assessment criteria.
At the top of SAP, that's not the only leadership problem.
The head of the supervisory board ,
Hasso Plattner
, has been under criticism for some time because he is stretching out his term of office like chewing gum and also likes to go it alone in other ways.
There are actually major tasks to be accomplished: SAP must be made future-proof.
The lucrative license business is to give way to a viable cloud business.
It is also important to clean up the legacies of Klein's predecessor ,
Bill McDermott
, who acquired more than 30 companies in a veritable takeover bonanza in his almost ten years at the helm of SAP.
Investors have long doubted that Klein and his board team will be able to make the move.
The share price is in permanent low flight.
However, what could end even more fatally for SAP: As colleague Kyriasoglou reports in her detailed company analysis, the once celebrated tech group is now increasingly losing talent.
The business news of the day:
We recently reported in detail
on the strange exit clause that
Tui
boss
Friedrich Joussen
had wrested from his supervisory board chairman
Dieter Zetsche .
Now the head of the tourism group is getting serious and is taking this lucrative option: As Tui announced on Friday morning, Joussen will resign on September 30th, CFO
Sebastian Ebel
will be his successor .
Investors lost confidence weeks ago and sent the Tui share plummeting.
On Friday, the paper lost again significantly.
A few days ago, the American hedge fund
Bridgewater Associates
made headlines with bets on a collapse in the share prices of large European companies.
Now Bridgewater has once again increased these so-called short positions.
As an analysis by manager magazin shows, the world's largest hedge fund is betting a total of around 10.5 billion dollars on price drops at large European corporations.
The list of companies targeted by Bridgewater also includes prominent German names such as
SAP
,
BASF
,
Siemens
and
Bayer
.
What else was important today:
At the beginning of 2020,
Carsten Knobel
took over the management position at
Henkel
.
Then the corona pandemic broke out, later Russia invaded Ukraine and inflation rates skyrocketed.
He didn't expect such challenges, says Knobel, unsurprisingly, in an interview with our colleague Thomas Werres.
In the interview, the Henkel boss explains how he is dealing with these problems, his strategy and growth plans and why, like his predecessors, he is again trying to save the cosmetics division of the consumer goods group instead of simply selling the division.
What is happening on the cryptocurrency market is polarizing opinions like no other area of the financial market.
The current crash of Bitcoin, Ether and Co is causing a lot of malice again.
Quite a few critics are already predicting the end of the sector.
But our expert
Cyrus de la Rubia,
chief economist at
Hamburg Commercial Bank
, has a different opinion: in a guest article he explains why he believes the crash in cryptocurrencies is a healthy adjustment.
The best of The Economist:
The stock markets are more turbulent than they have been for a long time, and tech stocks in particular have been under great pressure for months.
But the Japanese tech investor
Softbank
is undeterred by the planned IPO of the British chip designer
Arm
.
Arm is courted like hardly any other company, by investors, by competitors, even by politicians in Great Britain, where some believe that the chip company has strategic importance.
Colleagues from the "Economist" have analyzed the reasons and background to the special role that arm plays in the global chip market: everyone wants arm .
Colleagues from The Economist are also concerned with the escalating prices for food and energy, which are making life difficult for people in many places.
The development came at an unfortunate time, according to her assessment, because at the same time many governments were already far too indebted to provide relief.
The consequence, according to the gloomy forecast of the "Economist", could be unrest and uprisings in many countries around the world.
My recommendation for the evening:
Attack on Europe's car manufacturers in their very own market:
Volkswagen
,
Mercedes
,
BMW
or
Renault
can hardly meet the demand for electric cars on the old continent due to a lack of parts supplies.
The young competition from the Far East sees this as an opportunity to conquer market share.
Chinese companies such as
Nio
,
BYD
or
Great Wall
are filling the gap and are increasingly pushing into European business.
How the newcomers proceed, what this attack means for the local manufacturers and what role car rental companies play in the scenario - colleagues Margret Hucko and Sven Clausen explain all this in the new podcast on manager-magazin.de.
Best regards, your Christoph Rottwilm
