Europe's largest software manufacturer, SAP, has raised its forecasts for the full year slightly after an unexpectedly robust second quarter.
The business with software for use via the Internet (cloud) picked up again strongly and with the conventional software licenses things did not go down quite as much as experts thought.
For the earnings before interest and taxes adjusted for special effects, the management headed by CEO Christian Klein is now assuming a currency-adjusted decline of up to 4 percent this year. At best, it should stagnate. So far, the Walldorfers expected a decline of 1 to 6 percent. Also with the revenue from the cloud and with the products as a whole, SAP is now a little more confident, as the DAX group said on Wednesday.
In the second quarter, total sales of 6.7 billion euros were one percent below the previous year's figure.
Adjusted operating profit, with a decline of 2 percent to 1.92 billion euros, was slightly better than analysts had anticipated.
Without the effects of exchange rates, sales and operating profit would have increased by 3 percent.
Klein also referred to the strong growth in new contracts for the “Rise with SAP” cloud offering, especially in the United States.
The bottom line was that SAP earned 1.45 billion euros, almost two thirds more than a year earlier.
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, played a decisive role in this.