SAP wants to cut 3,000 jobs and is considering selling its US subsidiary Qualtrics

SAP plans to lay off around 3,000 employees worldwide this year. This puts the German software company among the youngest wave of layoffs in the tech industry. The restructuring will affect around 2.5 percent of the workforce. A sale of US subsidiary Qualtrics is also under discussion.

The German software group SAP closed the 2022 financial year with a decent fourth quarter and achieved its goals. This emerges from the current quarterly report of the company. Accordingly, earnings before interest and taxes fell last year by two percent to around eight billion euros.

SAP wants to lay off around 3,000 employees in order to continue growing

At the same time, however, sales rose by around eleven percent – ​​to almost 31 billion euros. This is partly due to the strong growth in the cloud software sector. For the 2023 fiscal year, the SAP board of directors is now targeting “accelerated revenue growth and double-digit growth in operating profit”.

According to CEO Christian Klein, the company intends to concentrate on growth in its traditional areas in the coming years. This applies above all to the in-house enterprise resource planning software (ERP), which also represents the main product line of the company.

Sale of US subsidiary Qualtrics

Meanwhile, the ERP systems are all-in-one tools that companies can use to manage their human resources, purchasing, invoicing and bookkeeping, for example – now also in the cloud. Despite the very positive 2022 financial year, SAP sees itself according to the news agency Bloomberg forced to downsize.

The background is therefore primarily the prospects for the 2023 financial year and the targeted growth. In order to save costs, around 3,000 employees are to leave the company as part of a restructuring. In Germany, around 200 employees are said to be affected.

The job cuts cover a total of around 2.5 percent of the entire workforce. SAP currently employs 112,000 full-time employees – around twelve percent more than before the pandemic. The company is also considering selling its US subsidiary Qualtrics. This should also provide more leeway for the cloud business.

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