SAP - Earnings Call - Q4 2024 (Media)

Transcript

Monika Schaller (Chief Communications Officer)

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and a very warm welcome. Thank you for joining us here live in Walldorf, and thank you to everyone who is joining us virtually. I'm Monika Schaller, Chief Communications Officer. All numbers you're going to see today are non-IFRS, and growth rates in percentage points changes are non-IFRS at constant currencies. Our CEO, Christian Klein, will kick it off, followed by our CFO, Dominik Asam. Later on, you have the opportunity to ask questions. Should you ask questions virtually, please also give your name and outlet, and with that, let's not waste any time. Over to you, Christian.

Christian Klein (CEO)

Yeah, thank you, Monika. Welcome, everyone, here on site at our headquarters, and of course, also welcome to everyone joining us worldwide. In a moment, we will deep dive on our numbers. We will talk more about our earnings today, but just attending my fifth WEF, World Economic Forum, in Davos, obviously, also please allow me to share a bit of the dominant topics in Davos on the C-suite, but of course, also with our political leaders. AI and Europe's competitiveness were, of course, a big topic, and when we look at the economic situation, I mean, for sure, the U.S. and China have large tech players. We in Europe have one, and these tech players in the U.S. and China are very dominating when it comes to AI infrastructure, when it comes to large language models, and yes, for sure, we see it.

AI is a very transformative technology, and it's very key that we apply AI so that our industries remain competitive. And with everything what is happening around us, I have to say, the wake-up call for Europe is loud and clear. Now, there was also a lot of talk: how should the response look like from Europe and Germany? And my strong advice also to our political leaders is not to copy the U.S.-Chinese playbook. We in Europe have very strong industries, and we don't need the European Union or the German government to subsidize new hardware factories or products which are not competitive. This is on us, the private sector, to make the investments, to deliver great products and innovations. But what is also very key for us on the private sector is that the Union, the European Union, finally becomes a union.

We don't have the framework to invest and drive innovation. I mean, just to give you a few examples on the digitization, which is so key for all of the industries, not only SAP. I mean, we have one AI and Data Act for Europe, but we have 27 in each member state. So with adding one more, you are adding bureaucracy, you're adding regulation, and you kill innovation before it's actually going into adoption. When we are talking in the United States about the sovereign cloud, we talk about one. And in this one sovereign cloud is also SAP software included, software which is also developed in Europe. So we should come together and find a very pragmatic definition about how this one European sovereign cloud should look like and how to run our workloads.

And that it doesn't matter maybe so much where every piece of hardware is coming from. Security questions, fair, where the data resides, where we're fair, but we need one sovereign cloud, not 27. I mean, think about it. We are a multinational. We make choices of investments in our labs in the U.S., in China, in India, everywhere. But for our startups, it's again a big obstacle to scale. And most importantly, what we need across Europe are bold and fast decisions. Now, asking us, asking what SAP can contribute, sometimes it's a bit forgotten. We have a large tech company in Europe, and that is SAP. And what is the advantage of SAP?

Looking at yesterday's news about the scale of AI infrastructure and the cost coming down and performance going up, I would say SAP has the big competitive advantage that we have business data no other tech company has. We are sitting at the nexus between business and technology. The value equation, how Mercedes, how our German industry giants improve their cash flow, improve the resiliency of the supply chain, is not happening on the infrastructure layer. It's about infusing AI in their supply chain, in their finance, in their HR software. This is what this is about. Just to give you a flavor, we made the math. We would be willing also to invest over EUR 40 billion in R&D and cloud operations in Europe only, SAP, 40 billion. But what we need, as everyone else, is the union we just talked about.

And it's really imperative now that we take actions both in the public and in the private sector. Talking about SAP, so we are climbing this mountain. I hope you can see it. It was sometimes a very steep mountain. In the first two years, there were a lot of doubts: can SAP pull it off? And I have to say, I come later to that. I'm very proud about the team, customers, and partners on how we mastered that. And when you look at our outlook for 2025, I would say it's a very confident and bold outlook. Because even beyond 2025, we actually see a continuing cloud acceleration, and we also see that our customers like the speed of innovation.

Who wants to sit on an eight-year-old on-premise release with outdated components and is completely decoupled from the innovations we are shipping in our business suite each and every quarter? Agentic AI, I mean, I just talked about it, what SAP can do. And I would say the AI strategy of SAP was spot on to focus on business data, to focus on things like knowledge graph, to do a lot of R&D invest on places where SAP has a unique competitive edge. Just yesterday, and there is a demo actually out there, you can see it, we showed a German CFO how to collect cash faster by multiple agents playing together with Joule sitting on top to provide various recommendations on how to collect cash faster. Is it an issue on the logistical side? There is the agent for logistics. Is it an issue on the procurement side?

There is this agent for the procurement. There is also the agent for sales, and all of them talk to each other. So cash collection will not only become more automated, you actually also see more value in collecting cash faster, and that is the next age of AI, and then 2025, and I hope you have some time for us on February 13, we worked on the next breakthrough innovation for a long, long time, and now we are ready to launch it, and 2025 will be the year of data, and I will come in a second to this big launch we are going to have in February. Now, Q4 was strong. I mean, you have seen it. Cloud revenue expanded once again by 27%. The most important figure is for me the current cloud backlog, and 29%, think about that.

I mean, the base is getting larger and larger. And when you make the math work, you see that these percentage points are not getting easier. Still, we accelerate the CCB throughout the year. And so that gives us, of course, a lot of resiliency. And this EUR 63 billion of total cloud backlog, which we already have signed in the books but not yet realized as revenue, of course, gives SAP the resiliency in times where the macro is, of course, not always easier. So 2024, we achieved all our cloud goals. We doubled the cloud revenue since 2020. And I would say, looking at the growth, there is no SaaS company growing faster than SAP. And the recurring revenue share of 63%, of course, again, gives us the resiliency on the top line, but as well as on the bottom line. Four years ago, we pulled this transformation off.

There were some doubts. But first and foremost, I don't want to miss the opportunity here, and we have held an all-hands, where I really have to say, I have to thank our 100,000 employees. And I know the speed of change at SAP was fast. People, of course, always said, "Hey, there is another change." But everything what we pulled off from strategy to execution landed in these numbers. And the tech sector moves unbelievably fast. And I know we requested and asked our employees a lot, but they delivered. And so this is their success story. And of course, we have a big ecosystem of partners. We are nothing without our partners. And so also they are following their strategy. They are helping us on the execution side, be it in development, in services, in sales. So kudos also to our over 20,000 partners.

And last but not least, thanks to our customers for the trust, who are always sometimes in economic tough times investing in our software as a sign of trust, seeing the value. And this is, of course, also a big thank you to all of our 400,000 customers. You see some of the logos. I mean, I mentioned in the earnings call this morning, we signed two large energy companies. And actually, what is so important also with these customers, their business model is changing. And so they are not only going on this RISE journey because they want to be only in the cloud. What SAP is doing is transforming their business models, helping them to run new businesses at scale, simplifying business processes. And of course, AI, as I said, is already in 50% of our deals, is a major value driver for customers signing in these days.

We had major go-lives, IBM; General Motors, super, super important, of course. In the cloud, we walk with the customers every step. And customer satisfaction is key. Adoption is key. This is also what we infused into the DNA of SAP over the last four years. Now, numbers are up. 2024 is a great year. In the technology space, there is no time to waste, so what we have to do is we are raising the bar. We need new ideas. We need new ways to accelerate our growth and, of course, to also expand our operating profit. Not only in 2025, we are in for the mid and for the long term, so let me quickly talk about some of the levers we are pulling off. First, I talked about product innovation. This Joule, SAP Joule, it's shining because it's integrated.

I mean, four years back, we were heavily criticized. And now we are beating a lot of best-of-breed because every enterprise, no matter if you're in cloud or on-prem, and no AI will change that, needs to run integrated on one consistent data model. And this is the foundation with BTP. And now we delivered already 130 GenAI use cases, over 1,000 AI use cases. And over, Joule already has 1,300 skills where end users can work with their language in translating and automating activities what they are doing on a day-to-day basis, which is a massive boost on productivity. And in 2025, we are doubling down again. Now, I talked about this exciting announcement. Let me quickly talk about it. Today, no matter which customer, they invest a ton of money, IT money, to overcome data silos. And you can build data lakes, which is good.

You can put a lot of data in a lake. That doesn't mean that your data fits to each other. That is actually the biggest challenge of all of our customers, and SAP has the commercial definition of all material, of all financial flows, of employee tasks in our solutions, and what we are doing, we are opening this up to break silos so that customers, partners, we can match semantically all data, structured, unstructured, SAP; non-SAP data. Because only then you can not only run your business better and you can steer your business better, you can also exploit even more value out of AI, and especially when you talk about these agents, they won't talk to each other if you have 20 different agents from all kinds of technology players. They need to talk one language semantically.

I would really like to invite you to our Business Unleashed event on February 13. Commercial matters. I mean, we needed to make it easier for our customers to sell, to buy, to adopt, and consume our portfolio. With every RISE and GROW contract, our customers are now having the benefit to consume all of our business suite in the cloud. They can start with finance, they can start with HR or supply chain. It's up to them. This flexibility is key. They can go into their transformation journey based on their priorities. They can land and expand without, again and again, having the commercial negotiations. Of course, the integration makes it easier to plug in and play. Land and expand is key for our customers. It will get way easier product-wise and commercial-wise. Now, simplification.

Such a company, and also to be credible to our customers, obviously, we need to walk the talk. So you cannot go out and say, "Hey, here is business AI, and it will help you to drive productivity." Of course, we have to use it by our own to gain more productivity, but also to show our customers how we are running SAP. And when you would walk around in our labs here and everywhere in the world, 20,000 SAP developers are already using Joule for developer. And what we are seeing is that they can produce code faster by 20%. AI-assisted contract validation. We are closing a ton of new business, so salespeople, finance people, a lot of billing, shared service people are working on this business. And with Joule for quote-to-cash, we actually could reduce the average contract booking time by 75%.

So while we are growing our business, we can actually equip our people with AI to do that job way more productive than before. And we have numerous examples in delivery, finance, HR, in sales, in consulting with Joule for consultants, which will also help us to really make SAP more simple and, of course, also more productive. People. And when you are a tech company, it's all about your people. And this year will also be the year of reskilling and learning. It was always a priority, but now so many job profiles are changing because of AI. So 15% of the working time of our employees should be freed up to dedicate to learning and development. No matter if you are in development, in sales, consulting, everywhere, AI will change your job. And it's important to also continuously reskill our employees, more important than ever.

We also hire new people. I mean, you have heard all the news about our transformation. It's also important that we added 9,000 people, data scientists, focused AI. We added also more go-to-market people in places where SAP is growing that fast, but we have not yet the footprint as some in our mature markets. That is where we are also increasing our workforce, and then Gina and team pulled off a new cultural transformation, best as never done. We talked about performance, which matters, and I hope it's also getting now more common in Germany that you can talk about performance, and we need performance, and we need to equip our people with the skills, but then we also need to help them to drive even better performance going forward.

That is something very important when you want to compete with a lot of technology companies around the world. There will be a dedicated program also around that to really equip our people with the skills to also make sure that our leaders can drive the change. That, of course, at the end, we also have a workforce which also can drive SAP into the future. We are very proud about what our people have delivered in 2024. Now, when you talk about leadership, we also announced some leadership changes this morning, starting with Sebastian. Sebastian Steinhaeuser started as head of strategy four years ago. In the meantime, he lives and breathes SAP. We gave him last year already more responsibilities on combining our operations teams, IT, processes to not only drive strategy, but also strategy to execution.

We found together with the supervisory board actually that we want to make this an executive board position. Why? Change needs to happen across SAP. And it's very important that we connect the dots end to end. And that's why we elevate Sebastian to the executive board. Also, we're going to announce Philipp Herzig as our new CTO. Philipp, great vision here. He's a great pioneer also in driving new innovation, even before AI. Now in AI, he did a great job, which also is a testament of the results we are reporting this morning. And now he assumes more responsibility. And in this responsibility, he will look into topics like quantum and others.

And always will make sure that in three to five years, SAP is still very competitive in applying this technology in our portfolio to drive value for our customers, focusing on the mid and the long term. Now, Chief Revenue Officer, both Jan Gilg and Manos Raptopoulos will actually be the two in the box for our customer success organization. Jan will focus on Americas and our global suite. Manos will focus on EMEA; APAC, and MEE. And both will report into me because we want to continue with the successful transformation of our go-to-market function we started in 2024. Marketing will actually remain with Ada. Ada Ireton will now become our new Chief Marketing Officer. We are very happy with Ada. Ada built great bridges to sales, digitized our marketing. The marketing funnel is working extremely well. And so we are very happy with the team.

Ada will be our new Chief Marketing Officer. That is actually it from the personnel, from the leadership side. Look, the past four years, I guess we have grown very much that we can turn an ambitious plan into reality. Now we are raising the bar. We are confident. We built a very strong foundation. Now it's about a continuous profitable growth journey for 2025 and beyond. With that, over to you, Dominik.

Dominik Asam (CFO)

Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Christian. Of course, thanks to all of you for joining us here this morning. Given it's early in the year, I would also like to wish everyone good health, peace, and success in 2025. SAP's strong finish to 2024 once again demonstrates great resilience in a year that presented new challenges and opportunities.

We not only delivered on our financial commitments for the year, but also built strong momentum that positions us firmly on track to achieve our stated financial goals for 2025 and beyond. 2024 was a year of transformation highlighted by both top and bottom line growth, as well as exceptional free cash flow strength. Our success in cloud revenue and robust non-IFRS operating profit throughout the year reflect the effectiveness of our strategic growth initiatives and our relentless focus on operational efficiency. Customers worldwide continue to choose RISE with SAP as their solution of choice for an end-to-end business transformation in large-scale enterprises, while small and medium-sized companies rely on GROW with SAP to drive their growth and innovation.

This is reflected in strong order intake and large cloud transactions with a volume greater than EUR 5 million, contributing 63% to our cloud order entry for the full year and an impressive 68% in Q4. Now, let me provide more details around our financial highlights. CCB, current cloud backlog, reached EUR 18.1 billion, up 29%. Total cloud backlog for the year grew even at 40% to EUR 63.3 billion. Cloud revenue grew 26% year on year, supported by cloud revenue growth of 27% in Q4, primarily driven by the strong performance of Cloud ERP Suite. It had an impressive year, demonstrating its role as SAP's core driver of growth, with an increase of 34% in 2024, up from 33% in the prior year. Cloud ERP Suite reached 84% of total cloud revenue in Q4, underscoring its growing contribution to our success. Software licenses revenue decreased by 21%.

Finally, total revenue for the full year exceeded €34 billion, up 10%. This performance was mainly driven by strong growth in cloud revenue and resilience of our support business, reflecting the ongoing progress of our strategic pivot towards cloud-based solutions. Now, moving down the income statement, our non-IFRS cloud gross margin for the year continued its upward trend from last year and expanded by 1.4 percentage points to 73.3%, driving cloud gross profit up by 28%. In the fourth quarter, non-IFRS operating profit was 24% up. Operating profit growth in Q4 was mainly driven by the strong performance in SAP software licenses and support business, as well as disciplined execution of the 2024 transformation program. For the fiscal year, we delivered outstanding operating profit growth of 26% year over year, reaching €8.2 billion.

The IFRS effective tax rate for the full year was 34%, and the non-IFRS tax rate was 32%, as previously guided. Free cash flow for the full year was down 19% to EUR 4.1 billion, exceeding the revised outlook range of EUR 3.5-EUR 4 billion. Recall that on top of payouts for restructuring of EUR 2.5 billion, we also absorbed EUR 0.2 billion of cash out for compliance-related settlement matters and fully discontinued SAP-triggered financing weighing on free cash flow with another couple of hundred million EUR. On the other hand, we received a couple of hundred million EUR from customers for receivables due in 2025, already before the turn of the year, which, in combination with strong profitability, enabled us to slightly exceed even the upper end of the previously guided range of EUR 3.5-EUR 4 billion. Non-IFRS basic earnings per share in fiscal year 2024 increased by 22% to EUR 4.53.

But that then brings us to the outlook, the future. As you've likely seen in the quarterly statement published earlier today, we have provided that year's outlook by now. Four years ago, SAP outlined bold long-term goals to guide our transition toward cloud-based solutions. Today, we are proud that this year's outlook solidly aligns with the ambitions we set in 2020, demonstrating the progress we've made in executing our strategy. Before I move on, I want to provide an update on our compensation metrics and foreign exchange hedging strategy that we will adopt going forward. As of 2025, we will enhance our compensation framework by incorporating free cash flow as a metric alongside Non-IFRS operating profit. This will ensure heightened attention towards working capital and other key drivers of free cash flow.

Additionally, to reduce foreign exchange-related impacts on free cash flow, we have further developed our hedging strategy, in particular for the U.S. dollar. As a reminder, we currently provide all income statement KPIs that are relevant for compensation purposes on a constant currency basis. Free cash flow has been and will continue to be provided on a nominal currency basis, as unlike the compensation-relevant income statement KPIs, it does include the result from foreign exchange hedges. We continue implementing a hedging strategy with a lead time of up to one year to mitigate the risks from U.S. dollar-Euro exchange rate fluctuations in free cash flow. By aligning hedging instruments with forecasted cash flows and maintaining a one-to-one hedge ratio wherever possible, we aim to reduce volatility and minimize the impact of exchange rate fluctuations on that free cash flow KPI.

This approach is by now largely completed and reflected already in the free cash flow outlook we have provided today. So while the average exchange rate for 2024, and as a result, the constant currency exchange rate underlying our outlook for income statement KPIs for 2025 is 108, that's the EUR U.S. dollar exchange rate, the spot rate today at year-end and even today is at 104, and that's relevant for the CCB. But the forward rate of our hedge portfolio for free cash flow for 2025 logically sits somewhere in the middle at around 106. In summary, we delivered on our key objectives for 2024, achieving strong top and bottom line results while demonstrating resilience in a dynamic environment. Customers continue to choose our solutions to help transform their businesses into more intelligent, sustainable enterprises, as reflected in our cloud performance across all regions of the world.

With our foundations now firmly established, in 2025, we must remain vigilant in our execution to sustain growth and set the stage for long-term success for years to come. I also want to thank all the hardworking employees we had, and both those who remain with us and also those who have moved on. We deeply appreciate their contribution to helping SAP thrive and navigate this transformational year. And we remain optimistic about the opportunities ahead, confident that our commitment to innovation and disciplined operating strategy will continue to drive results. Thank you, and we will now be happy to take your questions.

Monika Schaller (Chief Communications Officer)

Thank you, Dominik. Thank you, Christian. With this, we are moving into the Q&A session. As pointed out before, please say your name and the outlet. I'll take a first virtual question, and then the next one goes to Heidi.

Christian, you mentioned our EUR 40 billion investment in AI. We have a question from Bloomberg. Do you envision a European Stargate? Would you participate in such efforts? And if so, why hasn't Europe's biggest tech company done so yet?

Christian Klein (CEO)

Oh, we have done a lot. We invested, but sadly, we are investing in each country and not in one Europe, and so you heard probably about Delos. And Delos is not a marketing campaign. I mean, we had our best engineers and still working on a sovereign cloud for Germany. And there's so much talk about sovereign clouds here, sovereign clouds there. At the end, what the BSI told us, they want to have cloud, but completely decoupled from a global network. Now, when you're an engineer, know how cloud works, this is damn complex.

And this is high requirements on data security and rightfully, rightfully, actually higher requirements than what we have seen in Washington for our sovereign cloud there. Now, we do almost the same in France. Italy wants the same. Spain wants the same. So yeah, but does this scale? No, it doesn't scale. And it's also not possible because at the end, you are competing with U.S. tech players who have also a home market which scales. And we are benefiting, of course, also from a strong U.S. So with regard to the EUR 40 billion, that is not set in stone. We want to invest. And that is actually a clear increase. But what we need is, of course, a framework where we are not asking for money. What we are asking for is a framework where it's really good for SAP to invest and take startups with us.

Of course, that should be not exclusive. That is a platform which really should run and digitize public sector and private sector. We have many regulated industries who don't want to move one-to-one to a public cloud. Fair, but do we now need to build the 28 sovereign clouds here in Germany? And then you have all this in every member state, even here in Germany. In Europe, then comes Germany. And then there is not one on the federal. I mean, then comes the states of Germany. And when everyone orders software and interprets somehow data security rules by their own, I mean, obviously, nothing can fit together. It's a pretty simple logic. And that is my ask. And that requires, honestly, also bold decisions. Will all your people like that when you take something away and centralize it? No.

I mean, in SAP, the change was also sometimes required some tough decisions. But again, don't think so much about the election in four years. Think about what this country needs. This country and this Europe needs more Europe, more federal with regard to digitization. The time to act is really now. We are investing, but we have choice, and we want to invest further. Again, not only we, everyone in the private sector needs this framework.

Monika Schaller (Chief Communications Officer)

Thank you. Heidi Rohde, Börsen-Zeitung.

Heidi Rohde (Journalist)

Hi, good morning. Just if you look at the numbers, very impressive numbers. Still, the share seems to take a break, even a small dip. So what do you make out of it? Is this a reaction to yesterday's news when Western investors are getting in doubt about the perspective of the Western tech industry regarding AI progress? What is your view on that?

The second question, if I may, is about the management changes you've mentioned. You have a new CTO who is obviously a visionary, as I understood, but he is still not a member of the top management, but part of the broader consultancy team, as I understood. So does that mean that in a company founded by Hasso Plattner, the CTO is no longer so important?

Christian Klein (CEO)

Hasso, yeah. He would be happy if he would be still in the supervisory board. He would be happy with the solution we found. Let me quickly illustrate why. I mean, first, talking about the news yesterday, I mean, yeah, of course, our share developed really well. And Dominik always reminds me rightfully, what happens today is, of course, important, but even more important is that we're delivering on our promises mid and long term.

What we have guided today is, in my eyes, a very ambitious outlook in a macroeconomic environment, which is not easy. When you look at the kind of growth rates, I would say you can need to look really a long time, and you will not find a SaaS company with similar growth rates than SAP. Now, yesterday's news was also around, and there is a big debate also here in Germany, do we not miss a hardware company or compute who is really playing on AI infrastructure? Yesterday actually was the day where we showed, where someone showed that AI infrastructure will scale. It will become commodity. It's, of course, very important because without this infrastructure, you cannot run the GenAI modules. But more and more players are entering the markets, and there will be not one large language model.

So yesterday was actually a good day for SAP because it proved what we always said. We invest our R&D money into building the strongest AI foundations for businesses. And what businesses need is not only unstructured content. They need the business data. They need agents who talk to each other semantically. And that is what SAP is about. And last but not least, not every company, also not here at the German Mittelstand, has actually hundreds of data scientists sitting around and making this AI work. So also by embedding AI into our software and delivering out of the box, and that's what you can't do in on-prem, is actually 100% the right strategy. And then with regard to Philipp, look, Philipp, even before he became the head of AI of SAP, had a really impressive career.

He was very fundamental in making sure that our cloud business suite is the suite we are looking at today. It's complex things. We are running complex business processes. And Philipp was one of the masterminds behind making integration work, making extensibility work, and giving us the strong foundation. He ended up in the AI role. And now, why did we say CTO will still work very closely together with the CEO and will become part of the extended board, which is a very crucial function, which, by the way, a lot of U.S. tech companies have as well. Philipp will be now involved also in a lot of decisions around how much do we bet on quantum, how much do we bet on certain other technology innovations which are going to hit us in three to five years.

He will be involved in decisions on do we invest into a startup, into a unicorn. He will be involved into M&A. And all of these topics, obviously, require a close collaboration with the CEO. And that's why we said, hey, why do we want to break something which worked so well on AI? And that's how we then came to this setup. And we will have a very powerful and empowered CTO. And even more important, we have found the right candidate in Philipp.

Monika Schaller (Chief Communications Officer)

Thank you. I will take a question from the virtual audience before we continue with Angela Maier and then Reuters. Dominik, this one is for you, and it's about current cloud backlog. Dominik, the question is, your release says that the current cloud backlog will grow slower this year than last. Why?

Dominik Asam (CFO)

I mean, first of all, there is a more technical effect, which is we have recently consolidated an acquisition called WalkMe, which added a good percentage point to current cloud backlog, and just mathematically, once you then wait for more than a year in the basis you compare to, it's also added, and then that kind of increment is falling away. The other thing is, of course, the base is growing bigger and bigger, and 29% is an extremely high number. We need a lower rate to still sustain acceleration in total revenue growth because the cloud revenues are currently below CCB, so we have some room to sustain cloud revenue growth, and as I mentioned in my introductory remarks, the question, what is really driving cloud revenue growth, is all about the cloud ERP suite.

84% of the revenues at 30%+ growth rates for 12 quarters in a row. We think that this will sustain itself. So from that perspective, I think these are extremely strong numbers and underpin the commitments we've made to see acceleration in total revenue growth in both 2026 and 2027.

Christian Klein (CEO)

And maybe one point to add. Look, also looking at our sales numbers, I mean, 2024 was a record year. I would say the best in SAP's history. Now, when you are setting targets, I mean, Dominik and I discussed also about how aggressive do we also want to blend the numbers. And customers bought a lot of software. Still, there is enormous potential in our installed base. Only 40% so far has started the journey. The others will follow. The pipeline is really good.

But of course, you also want to focus now on the customers who invested into software. It's also about building a healthy business. So we also said in the target setting, let's also focus on adoption because we are here for the mid and the long term. It's always easy to preload invest and to stimulate further sales. But I guess it's also important in the cloud that we found the right balance. And now the base is becoming bigger and bigger. So one plus one is two. It's a high growth rate. But when you have a million plus a million, the growth rate becomes a bit more challenging. That's the thing about percentage growth rates. And I would say it's also about the balance and also signal to our teams on the go-to-market side. Yes, we want to win more customers, and we are winning.

Our win rates are way up. But what is also very important is adoption, especially around AI. When we walk into Sapphire, I want to see these customers on stage. I don't only want to feed into a hype. I want to see adoption. And that was also a little bit about the target setting. And of course, if we can prove ourselves that we can do more, of course, we can do more. But I would say this was a reasonable target, an ambitious target, especially when you also look at our competition.

Monika Schaller (Chief Communications Officer)

Thank you. Angela Maier.

Angela Maier (Tech Journalist)

Angela Maier, The market and NZZ. Two questions, if you allow. First, could you give us your view on your M&A strategy? So your liquidity is growing, your leverage is growing. So maybe it could be time for a bigger deal. So do you have any gap in your product portfolio?

So please, the first question. And the second, in the analyst call, you said that you have offered transformation credits in Q4 to convince all the big customers. So what exactly are these transformation credits? And did you give more of them in Q4 than in the previous quarters? Thank you.

Christian Klein (CEO)

Yeah. I mean, last question first. Every tech company, and I really underscore every tech company, works with migration credits. And actually, when you look at it, it's also way more healthy than to give discounts. Because when you can hold up your price, this is where you see recurring revenues for the long term. And so that's why every tech company also uses migration credits more as an incentive to actually convince customers to move ahead. And that was actually not a big change compared to previous quarters. Obviously, Q4 is bigger from a volume perspective.

I mean, that is clear, but it was now not actually a big uptick. Now, prices actually and multiples on customers actually pay us this much maintenance and pay us this much in the cloud actually developed very healthy, and that is also, for me, the most important indicator for the long term that we have really a healthy development in our customer base when it comes to pricing, but of course, customers challenge us. I mean, they are not buying this AI use case blindly. They want to see value. And there we also said, hey, we want to have a consumption-based and outcome-based commercial model to prove to our customers that we are doing the right thing, so on the commercial side, actually, we are very happy with the progress and the trend we have seen in the last year, actually. M&A. M&A.

Look, M&A, the good piece is looking at the pipeline for this year and looking at the momentum. Now we are launching in February 13, a big thing, a new offering, which will also further drive organic growth. So there is no need yet for us to acquire revenue, to do any kind of moves just to keep up our accelerated total revenue growth. This is what we will do organically. Now, can we rule out acquisitions like we did with LeanIX; WalkMe? If it fits really well and it serves our customers' needs and actually it fills a white space in the portfolio, we wouldn't rule it out, but there is no immediate need now to buy something. Think about it. Everyone also asks us, why you are not acquiring an AI company, large language models?

Yesterday was a good day, maybe to show that we did well not to do it, but rather build on our organic platform. And I guess this is always the balance what you have to strike. We don't want to just acquire for further accelerating our growth. The pipeline is good enough, strong enough.

Monika Schaller (Chief Communications Officer)

Thank you. Reuters.

Hakan Ersen (Analyst)

Hakan Ersen from Reuters. Going back to DeepSeek, did you have a chance to assess what the AI can achieve? And would you incorporate it into SAP given that it's a Chinese company and there's always issues with data security? And a quick question. You mentioned that 2024 was a record year for SAP. Did you mean that just in regard to the sales or overall?

Christian Klein (CEO)

I mean, 2024 record year, I mean, first of all, I mean, look at what we are coming from.

We should never take it for granted that this company does such a turnaround in just four years. I would say no matter if you now look at order entry, revenue, health of business (I really underscore health of business), the renewal rates are way better, way better than four years ago, and so customer satisfaction. I mean, these are all the indicators where I can see this was really a fantastic year. Yes, in terms of numbers and order entry and everything, it was definitely a record year. Now, with regard to DeepSeek, look, we, of course, also have in China, for China, various technology players. I mean, all the multinationals we run still do business in China. Of course, we are also using local technology in China, for China. We don't use Chinese technology always outside of China.

And that is also customer's choice, honestly. But we definitely want to always adhere to the several sovereign cloud standards where we have too many in Europe. But we want to adhere to that because we want to respect our customers' data, their security requirements, etc. And so yes, but oftentimes we use the Chinese technology in China. And on the large language model side, performance-wise, this module is great. We have tested it as well. Philipp and team have tested it as we test many other modules. But just to give you a European example, Mistral AI also does a fantastic job. Their module is also great. I mean, not yet at the costs, but they are serving different use cases. So we are testing all of these modules, and we are using them in different use cases.

There is not one LLM fitting all of our manufacturing use cases or finance use cases, HR use cases. So we are agnostic. And that yesterday, I guess, was really a day where it has been proven that this is the right strategy.

Monika Schaller (Chief Communications Officer)

Thank you. Trying to get the order right. Yes.

Robin Wille (Associate)

Yes. Robin Wille, Deutsche Presse-Agentur. Two questions. Hope that's okay. First one, I mean, summarizing what you just said, almost everything looks pretty good. However, what potential risks do you see that could negatively impact your business this year? I don't know, looking at the global economy or political changes in the U.S. or also in Germany. And the second question regarding your restructuring program, this should be completed at the beginning of this year, it was said.

In Germany, around 3,500 employees left the company in this context, but up to 10,000 jobs worldwide are said to be affected. What is the current status here? So how many employees have now left the company in this context? And in general, looking at your restructuring programs, was that it for now?

Christian Klein (CEO)

Yeah. Coming to your first question, Robin first, I mean, the risks, I mean, obviously, I mean, when I look four years back, we delivered on our promise, but this promise included a Russian market, which was pretty sizable. We couldn't really foresee how COVID will impact us. And still, we delivered. And I mean, looking at the geopolitics right now, I mean, a lot of discussion around tariffs and other things. I mean, it's hard to predict. But the good piece is in this world, SAP is super resilient.

I mean, we have a very high recurring revenue share. We have a very strong customer base who is loyal, who actually use our products. So that is actually a good foundation to have. I mean, obviously, when you look at risks, I mean, we want a strong German economy. I mean, when Germany is strong, it also is to the benefit of SAP. We want to see this economy here thriving. The same is true for some other markets we are playing in. Of course, you cannot always predict what will happen, but we feel very safe and bold about the outlook we have given. Your second question, sorry, Robin, was about transformation restructuring. Yeah. So some people left. We added 9,000 new jobs. Yes, the last wave of the restructuring will happen now in Q1. Then this program is finished.

We are finished for the year. Now, look at all of our competitors. I mean, sometimes here in Germany, we are making up that old adage restructuring. They restructure every year. Every year. And so while I'm not saying we will restructure again this year, for this year we are done after Q1, I mean, can you rule it out? No. But the tech sector is moving so fast. I mean, at the end of the day, you need to stay competitive. And sometimes you have to make these very tough calls. For the time being, I don't see any further restructuring on the horizon. But I also want to say, if in one, two, three, four years, whatever SAP needs, we will make these decisions. And again, it's, of course, never easy to make these decisions. But we are also doing this for the 100,000 employees who are staying.

They need to work for a winning company. They need to work for SAP, who is in also for the mid and the long term. So while these measures are never easy, sometimes they are necessary. But for this year, after Q1, we are done. Yes.

Monika Schaller (Chief Communications Officer)

Thank you. We have three more questions in the room. Please stick to one question with regards to time. If we manage, I'll get you in. Capital, FT, and then FAZ, and Vivo, if we manage.

Christian Klein (CEO)

Maybe also shorter answers.

Monika Schaller (Chief Communications Officer)

I would never say this.

Christian Klein (CEO)

You can.

Hannah Schwär (Journalist)

Okay. Good morning. Hannah Schwär from Capital magazine. I believe you have a small anniversary today. It's your fifth annual press conference as the only CEO. You talked a lot today about your team and the progress you've done.

Can you talk a little bit about how you look back on your personal performance and the road you've taken?

Christian Klein (CEO)

Personally, that's a hard question. I would rather prefer others to judge it. Look, yeah, anniversary, actually, it always reminds me about the birthday of my daughter. She will hear that for her lifelong that this was the night where I had to escape from the hospital and come here for this press conference. But again, I would say, personally, you have to always challenge yourself. I mean, I'm also not the type of person who sits here and says, "Hey, great year. And now let's lean back." I mean, as a CEO sometimes, but also I would say as a CFO, you need to be almost paranoid a bit about what happens in the world, what technological innovations can come.

You already, as great as this day is, you're already thinking ahead about what has to come in 12, 24 months. That is my job. And of course, there is a ton of pressure. But you have to deliver. And this is what we are in for. And personally, I have to say, yes, I learned my lessons. I mean, you always personally also developing yourself. I have a lot of support from my team. Without that, it would be impossible. But no matter if it's about think about how much time you spend. Your day has 24 hours. And you need some time for yourself, for the family, for doing sports. It's very important. But then how much time do you spend internally? How much time do you spend with research, with universities, with customers, and so on? And so you personally develop.

And so that was a journey also for myself. And this journey is never ended. I mean, I tell this also to our employees. The moment we rest and be satisfied and just celebrate each other, how great we are, at that moment, we are running a big risk. And so that is the kind of mentality what we have to have, especially in this sector who is moving so fast. Yeah. And then these bold decisions. Look, this is sometimes and I had to learn that as well. You're doing decisions and you know sometimes the media won't like it, people won't like it, customers. But I even would say when you look now at the customers to say innovation only, AI in the cloud, I mean, trust me, it's also to the best for our customers.

Of course, some customers said, "Yeah, but why can I not have it singular for myself? It won't work. It won't create the value." We also need to move forward as a company and innovate where everyone is innovating in the cloud. All the tech players in the U.S. made this shift for some time. So you need to strike the balance and you have to make those decisions. These decisions are never easy. I had to learn also, honestly, how to make these decisions and stay resilient and stay the course, which is never easy when you always have this quarterly pressure. I'm not alone in this. Thank you. FT. Can you share a little bit, Florian Müller, FT? Can you share a little bit more on why you decided to create this extended board?

And can you maybe also share some information on the departure of Jürgen Müller? Are there any updates from the company side? Yeah. The extended board, I mean, of course, we are also looking at, together with the supervisory board, first of all, I mean, looking at setups of other tech companies. My ask to the supervisory board and, of course, talking to Dominik and the team, Gina was, "Hey, our day has 24 hours. And this is, in the meantime, a very sizable company and we need scale." Then when you're looking at the extended board, it's for us now a great place where Ada comes in from marketing, then Jan comes in from the U.S. talking about SuccessFactors end to end with our two go-to-market Chief Revenue Officers. We will discuss a lot of portfolio topics, M&A, investments in research.

It's very good to have this diverse team together and making decisions. Also it allows us as an executive board to scale because you are reaching at a certain point your limit. This extended board is really allowing us to scale and make faster decisions. On Jürgen, I have to say, the supervisory board, we made a decision. Now it's actually you have to reach out to Jürgen or someone else to see where we stand. I'm busy with running this company.

Monika Schaller (Chief Communications Officer)

With that, Herr Freytag. Okay.

Bernd Freytag (Journalist)

Bernd Freytag, I'm Frankfurter Allgemeine. Could you give us some insights about your talks with the Deutsche Börse concerning the weight in the DAX? Will you stay in Germany if the person doesn't change their rules?

Dominik Asam (CFO)

Yeah. It's a little bit of a pity that we kind of outgrow the DAX. There was a cap at 10%.

We were successfully negotiating that up to 15%. Now we kind of bust that cap again. I think it's simply a result of the digital economy taking a larger and larger share of the economy at large. If you look at the top 10 market caps on the planet in 1980, there was only one, which was IBM in technology. In 2000, there were four. It was Microsoft still around today in that bucket, Intel, Cisco, and one European company called Nokia, and today there's actually eight if you include Tesla because it's also a technology company, so you see how the digital economy is really taking a larger and larger share, and we don't find it very intuitive that you then cap that digital technology only because in one country it's concentrated on one company, in this case, SAP.

But the good news is our strong efforts to attract U.S. investors are bearing fruit. We spend more time there. And there is a huge demand in the U.S. in terms of capital to be allocated. If you think about the $3,000 billion being invested in the biggest tech companies, if you only kind of are able to attract a tiny share of that, that more than offsets that point of view. But in total, I think it's more about the general regulatory environment. How conducive is the regulation in Europe for a company like SAP? We just mentioned one topic like that cap in the DAX. And there are many other things that hopefully the wake-up call we receive from the United States will resonate and then give us some opportunities to thrive even better in the future.

Monika Schaller (Chief Communications Officer)

Thank you, Dominik. Last question, Vivo. Short question, short answer.

Michael Kroker (Editor and Journalist)

Hi, Michael Kroker, WirtschaftsWoche. One question. You are really bullish on your approach towards AI. Can you give or will you give some certain numbers on how this AI use case influences your revenue?

Dominik Asam (CFO)

I mean, Michael, I mean, yeah, I mean, we talked today about the 50% of AI use cases embedded in the deals. What is, I guess, fair to say when you buy a supply chain or HR software from SAP? I mean, there is a certain bookings impact already in the CCB. And of course, it will go very fast because we embedded also be turned into revenue. And so when you look at the overall CCB growth and how well this is developing and the kind of acceleration what you can see, of course, one strong, the strongest lever is AI.

So we don't break out revenue numbers, but I guess 34,000 customers using AI, and I underscore using, is actually a pretty strong testament that there is a lot of value, and when you look at now the next wave of AI, and we have prepared there an early glimpse around agentic AI and SAP cash collection example, you see how we are sitting really at this nexus between business and technology, and so we are very confident, and the outlook we have given, the acceleration on total revenue is a lot of that is, of course, also related to AI.

Monika Schaller (Chief Communications Officer)

Yeah. Thank you very much. We are running out of time. Thank you very much for everyone joining us online. In case of any more questions, please feel free to reach out to the global PR team or myself. Thank you very much for joining us.

Have a great day, and for everyone here in the room, and we go off link now.