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SAP:
With a market value of 200 billion euros, it is the most valuable German company – and yet far behind the global champions
Photo: Ralph Orlowski / REUTERS
Things have been going well for SAP on the stock market recently. The Walldorf-based software company's shares have increased by more than 50 percent within a year: SAP CEO Christian Klein's promise to invest heavily in the AI and cloud business has already pushed the price to a record high last week. On Tuesday,
SAP
continued its price rise and was worth more than 200 billion euros on the stock exchange for the first time: This makes the software manufacturer by far the most valuable listed company in Germany, well ahead of Siemens (134 billion euros), the German-French joint venture Airbus ( 118 billion euros) and Deutsche Telekom.
However, an international comparison shows that when it comes to their stock market value, the top German companies are only in the second and third ranks. The most valuable stock exchange group in Europe, the Danish pharmaceutical manufacturer Novo Nordisk, has a valuation of the equivalent of 344 billion euros. With the success of the sought-after weight loss injection Wegovy,
Novo Nordisk
could push state health systems to the limits of their financial performance - and with the latest price rally has already left the French luxury group LVMH behind.
The difference in valuation compared to the US heavyweights is even clearer: nine of the ten most valuable companies in the world come from the USA. The software giant and AI winner
Microsoft,
like SAP, is currently trading at a record high and has thus passed the $3 trillion mark. This means that Microsoft is worth around 14 times as much as SAP (market value in dollars: 220 billion). Only
Apple
, which lost its position as the most expensive company in the world to Microsoft just a few days ago, plays in the same league as Microsoft. The Saudi oil company
Aramco
and Google parent
Alphabet
(around $2 trillion each) are worth around nine times as much as SAP. And the following US companies Amazon, Nvidia and Meta, each with a valuation of more than a trillion dollars, also play in a different weight class than the software providers from Walldorf.
The boom in the tech industry has increased the USA's dominance on world stock markets. In the ranking of the most valuable companies in the world, which the management consultancy EY creates annually, Germany's top company SAP was only in 61st place at the end of 2023. Siemens followed in 88th place - of the 100 most valuable companies in the world at the end of 2023, only two companies came from Germany.
la/dpa