Software giant SAP becomes Europe’s most valuable firm amid German stock market boom

Software-maker SAP turned Europe’s most valuable firm this week, driving a wave of synthetic intelligence enthusiasm and German stock market positive aspects.

The corporate had a market capitalization of round $342.4 billion by Monday’s shut, based on FactSet knowledge, with shares up 1.16% on the day and up greater than 40% during the last 12 months.

SAP, which presents company merchandise throughout cloud options, bills, provide chain administration and analytics, is extensively seen delivering higher income because it faucets its massive buyer base and wealth of enterprise knowledge to create alternatives from AI.

Financial institution of America‘s analysts earlier this month reiterated SAP as its high massive cap software program choose for 2025, spying “additional upside to avenue expectations on upsell together with from AI.” The analysts additionally stated enterprise cloud migration remained within the “early stage” and would proceed in recent times.

The corporate early final 12 months launched into a serious restructure focusing the enterprise on AI alternatives, and reported cloud income up 25% year-on-year in 2024.

CEO Christian Klein beforehand instructed CNBC it was the “greatest 12 months in SAP’s historical past” with the corporate’s cloud backlog at 63.3 billion euros ($68.5 billion) in 2024.

“We’re sitting on a really wealthy set of enterprise knowledge, HR knowledge, finance knowledge, provide chain knowledge, gross sales knowledge” from 40,000 prospects, Klein stated in January, calling this the “richest enterprise knowledge set of all tech firms.”

By AI instruments, SAP is permitting completely different departments akin to gross sales, provide chains and procurements to entry a excessive diploma of automation, Klein continued, whereas itself remaining “agnostic to any sort of any massive language mannequin” — the type of AI which makes use of big knowledge units to carry out varied duties.

Dominik Asam, the firm’s chief monetary officer, instructed CNBC in January that the AI software launched by Chinese language startup DeepSeek which rocked monetary markets earlier this 12 months was “excellent news” for SAP.

German markets are in the meantime on a bull run this 12 months, with the blue-chip DAX index up practically 16% within the 12 months up to now — far outpacing European friends such because the FTSE 100, up round 6.6%, and France’s CAC 40, up round 9.91%.

Sentiment has been buoyed by a big fiscal bundle permitted by German lawmakers this month enabling tons of of billions of presidency spending on infrastructure, local weather tasks and protection.

— CNBC’s Karen Gilchrist contributed to this story