SAP Q2 2021: revenue down 1%, 600 new S/4 Hana signups

SAP has reported second-quarter 2021 revenue of €6.669bn, down 1% on the same year-ago quarter. Its cloud revenue for the quarter has increased by 11% to €2.276bn, representing 34% of the total.

Its flagship enterprise resource planning (ERP) product S/4 Hana attracted 600 new customers, bringing total adoption to 17,000 customers, of which 10,100 are live, according to the supplier’s earnings statement. In quarter one, it added 400 new customers, and growth in quarter two is cited as 16% year over year (YoY).

SAP flagged Nationwide Building Society and Wales & West Utilities as customer wins in the quarter.

Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, said: “We’re seeing strong adoption of our cloud portfolio as customers select SAP for their business transformation. Our strategy is working. This is the third straight quarter of strong execution, and we continue to deliver unparalleled customer value through the strength of our platform and applications.”

CFO Luka Mucic added: “This has been another strong quarter with accelerating growth for SAP’s cloud portfolio. We saw excellent customer momentum and adoption and are raising our outlook for revenue and profit”.

The prior quarter saw the launch of the Rise with SAP package, which is a subscription service that packages managed cloud infrastructure and managed services in one contract. It is a way of bundling all the elements that make up what SAP has been calling “intelligent enterprise” for the past few years and making them available as a service.

In the second-quarter results statement, the supplier stated it “closed deals with more than 250 customers … Large customers such as AMD, Coop Switzerland, Etihad Airways, and Siemens Energy selected Rise with SAP”. Dixons Carphone was among the new Rise customers.

The SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is also highlighted in the statement, and described as “the foundation of the Intelligent Enterprise, providing a single platform for integration and extensibility across the SAP portfolio and non-SAP solutions, as well as deriving insights from data”. The platform groups SAP products into one foundation for developers, and was publicised at the supplier’s 2020 customer conference Sapphire in 2020.

The supplier said it has over 8,000 BTP customers and more than 4,000 partners. It reported that Hilti, Lenovo, NEC, and Renault chose SAP BTP offerings in the second quarter.

SAP’s first-quarter acquisition Signavio is also highlighted in the statement. A process mining software supplier whose acquisition was bracketed with the launch of Rise with SAP in January 2021, Signavio was said to have had “an outstanding first full quarter as part of SAP’s Business Process Intelligence (BPI) segment”.

SAP is raising its full-year 2021 outlook and it expects software licenses revenue decline for the full year as more customers turn to the Rise with SAP subscription offering. The outlook assumes the Covid-19 crisis will begin to recede as vaccine programs roll out globally, leading to further improvements in global demand in the second half of 2021.

It stated that it expects to receive €9.3bn to 9.5bn in cloud revenue, up 15% to 18%. The previous range was €9.2bn to 9.5bn.

It also drew attention to momentum in what it describes as “backlog growth” for S/4 Hana delivered over the cloud. “In particular in the US, SAP expects S/4Hana cloud revenue growth to significantly accelerate in the second half of 2021,” it said.