SAP license revenues down this quarter

Enterprise (ERP) software vendor SAP has just announced a disappointing set of financial results for the second quarter 2002. Software license revenues – normally a good indicator of a software vendor’s overall health – were eur496m this quarter, down 23% from Q2 2001. And although consulting revenues actually rose 3% from eur529m in Q2 last year to eur545m this quarter, revenues from training fell 9% to euro115m. In Q2 this year, total revenues were down 4% over the same period last year to eur1.78bn (2001: eur1.85bn). Net income was down 25%, from eur233m in Q2 2001 to just eur175m this quarter. In more detail, revenues related to SAP’s much touted supply chain management software – mySAP SCM – dropped 31% from Q2 2001 from eur150m to eur104m. And revenues related to the company’s customer relationship management software – mySAP CRM – fell 3% from eur104m in Q2 2001 to eur101m this quarter. It’s not all doom and gloom for SAP though. In Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) revenues actually increased 1% on last year to eur976m. However, revenues in the Americas dropped 12% and the Asia-Pacific region also performed poorly, down 5% on last year’s figure. SAP blamed the poor results on the fact it has lost a number of deals for which it had ‘informal agreements’ last month. Hasso Plattner, the firm’s co-ceo commented in an interview with the BBC: “If you take the top 50 companies in the world, a lot of them are SAP customers. And if some of these [companies] are on TV every day under some scrutiny and their share price drops out of the sky, then it’s highly unlikely that they sign deals.”