ASUG reports quarterly on SAP's financial results; gain insights now into the company's Q1 and Q2 2024 results.
SAP announced third-quarter financial results for 2024 that exceeded Wall Street’s expectations, with CEO Christian Klein citing “another strong quarter,” driven by cloud revenue growth and progress on business AI initiatives, as sufficient rationale for the company to bolster its full-year guidance.
In raising its 2024 outlook, SAP adjusted its anticipated operating profit to between €7.8 billion and €8 billion, also confirming that it is on track to meet its revised 2025 financial ambitions announced last quarter.
Assessing the third-quarter performance, SAP leadership reported €8.5 billion (or U.S. $9.2 billion) in total revenue, up 10%, and €4.4 billion ($4.6 billion) in cloud revenue, up 27%, with current cloud backlog growing by 29%, to €15.4 billion ($16.6 billion). Operating profit rose to €2.24 billion ($2.4 billion), marking a 28% year-over-year increase.
According to Klein, key growth drivers for SAP this quarter included its initiative to move large-enterprise installed-base customers to the cloud, reflected by accelerating cloud ERP suite revenue growth, as well as recent Business AI innovations such as Joule and SAP Knowledge Graph.
“Our AI strategy plays a key role across our Cloud ERP suite,” Klein told investors during the earnings call, noting 30% of cloud deals closed this quarter included AI use cases. “All the hard work to drive SAP’s cloud transformation over the last four years has led to a highly resilient as well as innovative company and offers us a strong foundation for many successful years to come.”
Key takeaways from the Oct. 21 earnings call, investor teleconference, and Wall Street’s reaction:
- SAP’s Q3 cloud momentum included a substantial 27% rise in cloud revenue, driven by a 36% increase in cloud ERP suite revenue, as well as a 29% increase in current cloud backlog, its fastest growth on record.
- SAP’s Q2 cloud momentum included a substantial 27% rise in cloud revenue, driven by a 33% increase in cloud ERP suite revenue, as well as a 29% increase in current cloud backlog, its fastest growth on record.
- SAP’s total revenue for the quarter was €8.5 billion, up 10%, driven by the sustained strength of the cloud ERP suite despite ongoing complexities in the macroeconomic environment.
- SAP’s operating profit grew by 28% to €2.24 billion, exceeding expectations, helped by cost-cutting measures and relatively few new hires.
- SAP raised its full-year targets based on the strength of its cloud business in the third quarter, adjusting its full-year cloud and software revenue target range to €29.5-29.8 billion (from €29-29.5 billion) and projecting operating profit between €7.8 billion and €8 billion (up from prior guidance of €7.6 billion to €7.9 billion).
- SAP completed its acquisition of WalkMe, a digital adoption platform company, last month.
- For the third quarter of 2024, SAP reported adjusted earnings of €1.23 per share on revenue of €8.47 billion, beating consensus estimates of €1.06 per share and €8.63 billion,
- Following the publication of SAP’s financial results, shares of SAP SE rose around 5% in premarket trading last Tuesday, to an all-time high of €221 ($239.21); analysts saw Q3 as a strong quarter for SAP, buoyed by increasing cloud ERP suite revenue and current cloud backlog growth.
Inside the Financial Results
SAP continues to push its on-premises ERP customer base to migrate to the cloud via its modernized SAP S/4HANA suite, ahead of on-premises system support deadlines that start to take effect next year.
No specific adoption numbers were disclosed on the earnings call, as in past quarters, but Klein stated that one fourth of customers have started their transformation journey to SAP S/4HANA—whether through RISE, GROW, or another route—reflecting that a significant proportion of existing SAP customers have still to transition from SAP ECC, SAP Business Suite, and SAP R/3 deployment.
On the earnings call, both Klein and Dominik Asam, CFO at SAP, focused on discussing the benefits of RISE, which is intended to help SAP customers implement cloud ERP solutions in alignment with best practices. Earlier this year, building upon last fall’s announcement of the RISE with SAP Migration and Modernization program, SAP announced updates for RISE, including a new customer onboarding experience and “clean core” quality checks throughout project implementation phases.
RISE is finally “the kind of methodology offering I always aspired for it to be,” Klein said during a subsequent analyst Q&A session, discussing how best practices for cloud ERP deployment can help customers simplify their business processes, differentiate with AI, and identify high-pressure business areas to schedule and structure business process optimization initiatives.
“Of course, there is an end of maintenance,” Klein said. “But clearly, clearly, clearly, it's the value and the need to transform is clearly the number one driver for our cloud growth.”
Simultaneously, a company-wide restructuring program is underway at SAP; expected to impact between 9,000 and 10,000 positions and conclude early next year, the program will largely encompass voluntary leave programs and internal re-skilling measures, according to Asam. Overall expenses associated with the program are estimated to be around €3 billion.
Given the recent acquisition of WalkMe, as well as reinvestment into strategic growth areas within the company, SAP now anticipates ending the year at a slightly higher headcount than last year, though that figure reflects “a few thousand colleagues who will leave the company as part of the transformation program on January 1, 2025,” Asam told investors.
Earlier this year, SAP also announced enhancements for RISE customers moving to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, via premium and premium-plus tiers providing access to AI capabilities via Joule, as well as access to SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), SAP Datasphere, and SAP Business Network capabilities.
Joule was previously only available to premium-plus tier customers, but SAP subsequently announced that all RISE and GROW customers will have access to Joule, via SAP AI units; the generative-AI copilot remains unavailable to those not leveraging either transformation-as-a-service offering.
Supercharging Joule and Business AI
Klein also touched upon announcements made at SAP TechEd, reiterating that Joule, the generative-AI copilot SAP launched last year, will be equipped with collaborative AI agents to tackle more complex business tasks and a knowledge-graph solution to ground its AI technology in SAP-specific business semantics.
“Most AI chain instances are fit to perform only one type of task in sales, in HR, in supply chain,” Klein said on the earnings call. “However, many key processes cut across departments. Financial predictions, for instance, involve data from sales, supply chain management, HR and other functions. Joule will soon be able to orchestrate several AI agents to carry out such complex processes end-to-end. That's possible, because SAP speaks the language of all corporate functions. We are not trapped in one silo.”
Klein stated that “several hundred customers licensed Joule” in the third quarter, during which time SAP achieved its goal to embed over 100 AI use cases across SAP solutions and added “over 500 skills to Joule,” putting the company “well on track to cover 80% of [SAP customers’] most frequent business and analytical transactions [via Joule] by the end of this year.”
Calling the recently announced knowledge graph engine for SAP HANA Cloud “a real game-changer in our industry,” Klein explained that the engine “captures decades of business process knowledge and allows generative AI to deeply understand SAP systems with regard to structured data, the tables, the connections; that in turn enables generative AI to provide much more relevant, reliable and context-sensitive answers.”
Expert Analysts Offer Perspective
In the SAP analyst community, the Q3 2024 financial results were seen as strong, though questions remain around the company’s ability to continue driving remaining on-premises customers to cloud ERP solutions ahead of mainstream-maintenance deadlines that begin to take effect next year, as well as the limited availability of business AI to customers not selecting RISE or GROW for cloud migrations.
It was “clearly a great quarter for SAP, with strong growth in cloud revenue, a key metric for Wall Street,” stated Joshua Greenbaum, Principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting, a sentiment shared by Jonathan Reed, Co-Founder at Diginomica.
“It is very hard to argue against what SAP is doing when its cloud revenue is now more than half the total earnings, and the cloud sales backlog is up 25 percent,” Reed told ASUG. With that in mind, he added, SAP needs to focus on upgrading customers running older versions of SAP S/4HANA onto the latest versions — even those unwilling to leverage RISE in moving to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition.
“Not every customer is persuaded by the RISE business case, though SAP has bolstered RISE with more robust transformation services and add-on offerings,” Reed said. “I am watching to see how fast GROW—for moving to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition—matures, as I see that as SAP's most compelling long term cloud ERP play.”
According to Fabio Di Capua, VP Analyst, Application Services at Gartner, Klein’s admission that only a quarter of installed-base customers have started SAP S/4HANA transformation journeys is indicative of significant challenges facing these legacy SAP users. “With 2027 and 2030 rapidly approaching, this is not a great signal, as confirmed by the resiliency of software license and maintenance revenues, with legacy ECC clients still struggling to create the business case for the migration,” he said.
“At the same time,” he added, “clients that are already advanced in their cloud use, with native engagement with the major hyperscalers, are finding challenges in accepting the RISE commercial offering, due to a lack of comparable functionality, such as cloud elasticity, to what they already have today.”
Di Capua further noted that SAP making generative-AI capabilities available to premium-tier RISE customers, as opposed to its previous stance of offering these capabilities for premium-plus tier RISE customers only, is “a sign that few clients were willing to invest additional money for the functionality,” suggesting the need for SAP to further prove the immediate business value of its AI embrace to its customer base.
“SAP also continued to push its AI gains, stating that 30% of its cloud deals in Q3 had some AI component, though, unlike previous quarters, SAP did not specify which products or versions of AI were the main contributors,” Greenbaum noted.
“I believe SAP is being rewarded by Wall Street for its AI strategy, at least partially on the richness of its internal (and "opt-in" customer) data to power its AI offerings,” Reed added. “But, if SAP doesn’t continue to show progress in delivering adoption and revenues on this, investors may push back.
“This is not just an SAP issue,” he added. “Many of SAP's largest competitors are in a similar position, with strong valuations in part rewarded for still-maturing generative AI offerings and outlook — and questions about whether products like copilots will offer deep business value and profitability versus their costs.”