By
Mercy Tukiya Mutanya
November 7th, 2023
The dip in the shares of SAP was further compounded by the company’s update of its Business Outlook for 2020.
The shares of the multinational software corporation SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) have plunged by as much as 20% in the pre-market following poor revenue reports released by the company. The same tendency is preserved after the market opening. Now they are 23% down. Per the released earnings, the company attributed the poor performance to the COVID-19 crises which in a way also created an inflection point for the firm’s customers.
In the financials released, SAP saw a 4% drop in its total revenue at 6.535 Billion euros (based on the International Financial Reporting Standards, IFRS). Despite this overall revenue dip, the company saw improved revenues in its cloud computing outfit. Per the IFRS standards, the Cloud revenues climbed 11% coming at 1.984 billion euros. The reported Cloud and Software revenue came at 5.544 billion euros representing a 2% dip. From the figures published, Operating Profits were down by 12% to 1.473 billion euros.
Seeing the performance of the Cloud business unit in the Q3 results, SAP Chief Executive Officer Christian Klein made insinuations to suggest that the company will focus more on bolstering its Cloud offerings in a bid to shore up revenue to about €22 billion in 2025.
“In Q3 we continued to improve our operating margin against a strong prior year comparison amidst a challenging environment,” Luka Mucic, SAP’s Chief Financial Officer. “Our expedited move to the cloud will ensure we continue our path as a cloud growth company while we remain focused on cost efficiency,” added he.
The plunge in SAP shares has been duly noted as one of the worst in the company’s history in about 12 years according to CNBC and the massive dip has caused the firm about €25 billion ($30 billion) in its market capitalization.
Following the Shares Dip, SAP Revises Its Business Outlook
The dip in the shares of SAP was further compounded by the company’s update to its Business Outlook for 2020. With the current realities of things, SAP now expects €8.0 – 8.2 billion non-IFRS cloud revenue at constant currencies (down from the earlier projected range of €8.3 – 8.7 billion). At constant currencies, the Cloud and Software revenues have been forecasted to be in the range of €23.1 – 23.6 billion non-IFRS as compared to €23.4 – 24.0 billion forecasted earlier.
With the modest reprojections by the firm, it is raising its cash flow expectations for 2020 based on the firm’s year-to-date cash flow performance. SAP now projects an operating cash flow of €6.0 billion (previously above €5.0 billion) and a free cash flow above €4.5 billion (previously approximately €4.0 billion).
SAP also made some remarkable adjustments to the defined Medium Term Ambitions set out on April 24 last year. Amongst the new expectations is to accelerate the firm’s direct investments in Cloud business with an expectation to boost revenues by 80% by 2025.
In the emancipation for a better-projected revenue in the near term, SAP will be depending on the performances of some of its key business subsidiaries including Qualtrics which it planned on taking public as reported earlier.