Earnings Labs

SAP SE (SAP)

Q2 2014 Earnings Call· Thu, Jul 17, 2014

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. This is your Chorus Call operator. Welcome to SAP 2014 Second Quarter Earnings Results Conference Call. Throughout today's recorded presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions) I’ll hand over to Stefan Gruber. Please go ahead, sir.

Stefan Gruber

Management

Yes, thank you. Good morning or good afternoon. This is Stefan Gruber, SAP Investor Relations. Thank you all for joining us to discuss SAP’s results for the second quarter 2014. I’m joined here in Walldorf by Co-CEO, Bill McDermott and Luka Mucic, our CFO, who will both make opening remarks on the call today. Also Executive Board Member, Rob Enslin, who leads Global Customer Operations and Bernd Leukert who leads development and delivery of all products across SAP's product portfolio are on the call today and will join us for the Q&A. Before they get started, I want to say a few words about forward-looking statements. Any statements made during this call that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as anticipate, believe, estimate, expect, forecast, intend, may, plan, project, predict, should, outlook and will and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. The factors that could affect SAP’s future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, including SAP’s Annual Report on Form 20-F for 2013, filed with the SEC on March 21, 2014. Participants of this call are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates. Please keep in mind that unless otherwise noted, all numbers referred to on this conference call are non-IFRS and growth rates are non-IFRS on a constant currency basis. With that, I’d like to turn the call over to Bill McDermott.

Bill McDermott

CEO

Thank you, Stefan and thanks to everyone on the call for your time today. I really appreciate it. Before I begin, I would like to congratulate SAP and Oliver Bierhoff and the German National Football Team on their thrilling march to the 2014 World Cup. I am proud this is not only a winning team, but they co-innovated with SAP and they served as a showcase for match insights powered by SAP HANA. But instead of giving you my take, I thought it would be better to give you Oliver's own words and before the tournament, Oliver was quoted a few times, once was in the media in Brazil where he said, imagine this, in just 10 minutes, 10 players with three balls can produce over seven million data points. With SAP HANA, our team can analyze this huge amount of data to customize training and prepare for the next match. Bierhoff went on to tell ESPN this week, the same techniques were used to study opponents. Jérôme Boateng, has to look at the way Cristiano Ronaldo moves in the box to use another example and before the game against France, we saw that the French were very concentrated in the middle, but left spaces on the flanks because their fullbacks didn’t push up properly. So we targeted those areas. When you think about what they accomplish with their smart use of big data, it amounts to making a complex game look simple. And now we know that simple helps win the World Cup. I would like to offer congratulations again to the Deutscher Fussball-Bund. Earlier in this year, we launched a new strategy to become the could company powered by SAP HANA and the focus of this strategy is to make our customers Run simple. This means providing our…

Luka Mucic

CFO

Thank you, very much Bill. As you just heard Bill talk about our strong second quarter results with excellent growth in the cloud and a very solid performance in our cloud business, before I get into further details on those, let me address a couple of technical topics upfront. First on currency. We saw again a strong currency affect on the topline in the second quarter. Our Cloud subscriptions and support revenue was negatively impacted by seven percentage points and our SSRS revenue was negatively impacted by four percentage point. Then we recognized the provision of €289 million for the Versata Litigation in Q2. To ensure that our non-IFRS numbers are comparable over time to change the definition of our non-IFSR numbers to exclude the effects from the Versata Litigation. Before I go into the quarter's results, on a semi-personal note I wanted to say a few words about SAP's implementation of simple finance that Bill mentioned before. SAP deployed this revolutionary solution powered by SAP HANA in just 10 weeks from February to end of April without any disruption to our business. We cut more than 420 hours from our financial close processes and we reduced the date footprint from seven terabytes before HANA to under two terabytes. SAP now has one common platform for both regulatory and managerial accounting, with further real time processing and most importantly unlimited reporting capabilities across all dimensions and a significant potential to optimize our processes. What I am particularly proud of is that simple finance was developed in close cooperation between our Stella development organization and our internal finance organization. So in a nutshell its simple finance, from finance, for finance. It reflects our un-simple approach. Our close process was optimized. We are among the fastest tax companies to publish our quarterly…

Bill McDermott

CEO

Thank you, Luka. I want to hand it back to the operator. We can now start the Q&A session.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we will begin the question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions) First question is from the line of Walter Pritchard of Citi. Please go ahead. Walter Pritchard – Citi: Thanks. You talked about simplified financial on the call here in your prepared remarks and I am wondering if could you give us an update on early customer traction there and what you see in the terms of sales cycles on that product? It does sound like SAP itself got some significant benefits. Is that something customers are seeing pretty quickly or is that something that you envision that this sale cycle to be fairly long given at the core of customer's operations.

Robert Enslin

Analyst · Walter Pritchard of Citi

Walter, this is Rob Enslin. No I think what will see was simple finances that the sales cycles will be shorter and generally for net new customers clearly a quick win and for existing customers you will see them take advantages as Luka said. So you will see smaller and shorter sale cycles.

Stefan Gruber

Management

Thank you very much. Let's move to the next question.

Operator

Operator

Next question from the line of Adam Wood of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Adam Wood – Morgan Stanley: Hi. Thanks very much for taking the question. Just to if I could, just first of all on the SMB that sounds like a pretty good move and obviously a big opportunity for you. Could you maybe just help us on the product side of things and there is obviously, there was a cloud initiative with business by design that's been deemphasized, what will be the main product focus on that SMB opportunity in terms of go-to-market? And then secondly on the investments around HANA price and cloud, I think there is a lot of debate in the market on multi tenant SaaS [first hosted SaaS] (ph) and obviously some of the deals that will be more hosted than multi tenant. Could you may be just on two things, to your clients do you think care about the difference on that? And secondly, from your cost point of view, does it make a big difference to you and can you be profitable delivering that service as you are going to? Thank you.

Bill McDermott

CEO

Hi, this is Bill McDermott. Adam, how are you? With regard to the Dean Mansfield we wanted to approve an operator to go into that space, a guy that knows it well. By design it's still part of our product portfolio and we now have by design on SAP HANA, which is absolutely a game changer because everything is faster and better on HANA as you know. We also believe strongly that B1 has been going through an indirect channel now and has proven itself to be very successful, high growth, double-digit business with good margin. So we will continue that. But we also put B1 up on HANA in the Cloud and we go global and we think that can be a very serious category killer. Once it get into the market place and people see what it can do on HANA and we will continue innovate in that space now with a defined agenda underneath Dean Mansfield. So it's a combination of things we are going to go after the market with. Related to the HANA enterprise Cloud and the multi tenant debate, the bottom line is the HANA Enterprise Cloud and each customer wants their solutions. They want it beautiful. They want them to work and yes, we can make money on it because HANA is the great simplifier. When you radically simplify the IT stack I mean SAP used to run on eight terabytes of data. Now it's like closer to 1.5. You dramatically lower your cost of operation and improve the speed of everything in the operation. So it's perfect for Run simple. It doesn’t matter whether it's single or multi tenant. What matters is the customer gets what they want at the price point in the performance and the user experience they’re looking for and that's precisely what we intend to give them. Incidentally, the one thing I would tell you on the SMB market when we looked at it we sized this for the SME customer that's in the 300K size. So we are going after a smaller customer and lots of names because we think we can really scale out that part of the pyramid that we haven’t spent a lot of time in. And even not spending time there we're doing pretty well. Can you imagine, we put our mind to it? Adam Wood – Morgan Stanley: Thant’s great. Thanks so much, Bill.

Bill McDermott

CEO

Thank you very much, Adam.

Stefan Gruber

Management

Okay. Thank you very much. Let's go to the next questions please.

Operator

Operator

Next question is from the line of Michael Briest of UBS. Please go ahead. Michael Briest – UBS: Great, thank you, good afternoon. We hope we heard a lot of detail there and I appreciate the discloser you gave around the Cloud business, but could you may be give us some more numbers around the active use of data you have on products like Employee Central, Clouds For Customer. One of your competitors is now giving a lot more granularity on that so would be helpful. And then secondly, in terms of the simplification strategy I think it has a lot of resonance. Can you may be talk about pricing for the on-premise suite and to what extent you will be willing to offer subscription for an on-premise product just to break down some of the complexities of the other price list? Thank you.

Bill McDermott

CEO

Yeah. So first thing first, Michael, how are you? We can tell you that we have 38 million users in the Cloud. We can tell you that we’re operating all the things around integrated human capital management for Employee Central in the Cloud and 28 distinctly different countries with payroll included etcetera where work days in two. We can tell you that we’ve grown Employee Central from 30 to 390 customers and it’s kind of on a roll. And we can also tell you that we’ve beaten the pants of the competition with Cloud for Customer, because as Gartner said, it’s a visionary product with a much more beautiful user experience and when you combined it with omni-channel eCommerce, it really does get you beyond the commodity nature of salesforce.com and gets you into a totally different conversation. So let me tell you all those things. And as it relates to pricing on the software on-premise we’d most happy to rent it. Actually, we already do and in fact the interesting thing that we’ve learned is our customers want to buy it, even though we’ve gone out of our way to keep reminding them that we’re only too glad to rent it, because we understand the NPV of that model as good as the other guy and we think it’s a great model. But they view SAP as a strategic asset and they for now at least have behaved in a way that indicates purchases their preferred option, but the rentals on the table and we look forward to more and more customers renting our software.

Luka Mucic

CFO

John, maybe just one more comment nevertheless we took significant steps this year to simplify our pricing even in the non structures. We are now bundling more solutions to value-added packages that really address the different buying senders in a cohesive need and by that, we've significantly reduced the number of SKUs in our price.

Bill McDermott

CEO

And what’s interesting to Luka's point in terms of Run simple, we have actually reduced our price list by 70%, 70. So the whole company SAP is not only marketing run simple, because we know with the great simplify HANA and the Cloud we can, but we’re also behaving very differentially within the company and the clock speed has radically picked up especially in the last 60 days. Michael Briest – UBS: Thank you very much.

Bill McDermott

CEO

Thank you, Michael.

Stefan Gruber

Management

Thank you. Let’s move to the next question please.

Operator

Operator

Next question is from the line of John King of Bank of America. Please go ahead.

John King - Bank of America

Analyst · John King of Bank of America. Please go ahead

Great. Thanks very much for taking the questions. I just had two if that’s okay. First of all, on the deal sizes I felt one of the notable things in the quarter was that you saw a big pickup in deals of over €5 million, which seem to be up about 50%, that's the first time in some time, is that a function do you think of just an easing comparison year-on-year or would it be fair to link some of that to the maturity of the suite on HANA and that’s reaching above the level of maturity and allowing you to sign bigger deals? And the second one was just for Luka, on the tax guidance, you’ve not changed the guidance obviously, but you’ve beaten I think again the expectations a couple of times, could you just comment as to what you expect for the second half and whether there’s any one-off, which would mean you would be in the middle of the range or whether towards the end of the tax guidance would be more likely? Thanks.

Bill McDermott

CEO

Hey, John, I start off on the deal side. This is Bill, just to give you a flavor for it. It is true that the €5 million and above deals increased by about seven percentage points on a year-over-year basis, which is really encouraging and yes, the suite on HANA now is hitting scale. As you know we have about 1,200 customers now purchasing the suite on HANA to complement the 3,600 customers that have made an investment in HANA and the 1,500 startups that run their whole future on HANA. So HANA is becoming a standard and I am telling you since Sapphire there is real tailwind going on here. The Run simple concept, the vision of it has hit home. I think approaching the Cloud from the business network and the lines of business as well as the Suite on HANA and the Cloud has given the customer great confidence that we have the platform, we have the Cloud Solutions and we even have the network and that complements the On-Premise very nicely. So, you tend to when the strategy in the right place for the customer increase the building materials because the customer wants more of a single vendor approach to their enterprise and we are seeing more of that. And it will also tell you that their larger deals going up because we’re going into areas we didn’t use to be. The omni-channel, e-commerce business is up 158% year-over-year. Cloud for customers is up even high higher than that. These are businesses that weren’t ringing the cash register and now they are in a major, major way. So, I feel fantastic about coming at a Sapphire and what’s happened to the over pipeline including large deals.

Luka Mucic

CFO

John, maybe to cover your question on the tax rates, you’re absolutely correct in the first half year we clearly state below our stated guidance but SKU made mainly to two effects on the one hand. We had some special effects from prior year taxes that we’re rolling into this first half year favorably. And the second point is that the distribution of our revenues develops more favorably than our base plan so to say as far as tax rate effects are concerned. So are these all effects that we can bank on for the second half year not necessarily, but it’s true we are on a good way. You also know that in the second half SAP and tax rates always tend to trade a little bit higher and of course we have a huge second half still ahead where the revenue distribution can make a difference. But so far we on a good track and let’s see where we stand after Q3 and then I will be in a better position to give you a more definitive view on where we will land within or below the guidance. John King – Bank of America: Perfect. Thanks very much.

Stefan Gruber

Management

Thank you. Next question please.

Operator

Operator

Next question is from the line of Stacy Pollard of JPMorgan.

Stacy Pollard - JPMorgan

Analyst · Stacy Pollard of JPMorgan

Hi, just a quick question on HANA. Now you said it was ahead of schedule and the number of customers, you’ve talked about that. Would you say the same about revenue generation and I know it's hard to separate, but if there’s any sort of gut feel and then also just when you think about the maintenance revenues, can you talk about what portion is price increases and then what portion is kind of maintenance contracts or separated out a new maintenance contracts, sorry.

Bill McDermott

CEO

Stacy, thanks for the question. I’ll start it off and I know Luka will comment on the maintenance piece of it. We also have Rob Enslin, our Head of Global Customer Operations and Bernd Leukert, the Head of Innovation, who is doing a fantastic job. Both these guys are unbelievable. But in terms of HANA, the fascinating thing is HANA is growing very swiftly. We are in a company that has everything attached to HANA. If it’s a Cloud Solution and its 38 million users, that means we’ll soon have 38 million users running HANA. Can you imagine the opportunity for that hockey stick? So, everything is HANA. There was no point in breaking it out other than the account -- the number of accounts, the suite on HANA and what we’re doing with startups etcetera. Having said that, you should feel very confident that HANA is embedding itself as a standard in the marketplace. Yesterday I was with one of the largest chemical companies in the world. On the fly we were inventing new business models for transportation, logistics and the things that actually get stored in the containers so they can be viewed in the control center in real time. They couldn’t believe that all you have to do is feed data into HANA and then you have new business models. A large manufacturer met with me yesterday in Germany. We’re doing machine-to-machine and preventative maintenance and they’re reinventing their services business model. So what you see here is the ultimate simplification of IT with HANA, but also brand new business models being stimulated on the fly where companies can see a whole new way to run their business. So HANA has now taken hold. We don’t have to prove that it works. Everyone knows it works and now in the stage of how do I do it? And it’s really taking off very nicely, and yes, it’s ahead of our internal goals.

Luka Mucic

CFO

Now, few words on the maintenance, the strong performance in maintenance is a function of two primary drivers. The one being that we have virtual nurtured in maintenance. We have renewal rates that are between the 97%, 98% ranges. With every new license that we sell, we add typical 22% and that price support on top of that, so it just is a self enforcing mechanism there. The second one is that our offerings are performing extremely strongly in terms of adoption. Premium support has very, very nice double-digit growth rates, so max attention active embedded offerings, they are extremely strong. And secondly among the established standard support models end up price support is more and more dominating as de facto standard. Price increases have really only a very minor role to play, because we said that for enterprise support we keep the prices at 22% until 2016 for any new licenses sold and for existing license increases and for standard support and enterprise support are kept at CPI indexes and in many countries these actually don’t result in an increase only a minor tiny increase because typical the consumer price indexes remained relatively stable. So it’s really a function of virtually non-existent churn as well as growth in premium support and high adoption rates for enterprise support.

Stefan Gruber

Management

Okay. Thank you very much. Let’s move to the next question, please.

Operator

Operator

Next question is from Rick Sherlund of Nomura. Please go ahead.

Rick Sherlund - Nomura

Analyst · Nomura. Please go ahead

Yeah. Thank you. I wonder if I can get some clarification on simple seems ironic, I’m confused by simple, but we’ve got Run simple, which I presume is right now mostly running the business suite on HANA but then you got Simple Financials to be followed by simple HCM, simple ERP. So I’m kind of excited about the opportunity for the simple suite of products, because its simpler, it's got a nice interface, its hosted by you guys on HANA. But I’m not hearing much about that. I’m hearing more about Run simple, which I think is more business suite on HANA. Is there kind of reluctance to talk too much about it until it’s fully out because it could disrupt the current business suite on HANA, and maybe some clarification how you should be thinking about this?

Bill McDermott

CEO

Yeah, Rick, first of all, it’s Bill. That’s excellent question. Let me clarify it. First of all, Run simple is an absolute movement within our company to simplify our company. It also happens to be the new identity for the SAP brand. And therefore when I speak of run simple, I’m speaking as the architect of run simple for a corporation to abide by in every single way whether it’s our brand and how it impacts our customer or how we run our company and streamline everything so we can do anything for our customers. So, that is a movement. It’s an identity. And there’ll be lots of things that you’ll be seeing on that in the days and weeks ahead. In terms of simple financials and other products that might take on the simple [monitor] (ph) they’re doing so on the basis of brand and that is a building block and there’ll be more of them. So that’s pretty much in nutshell. Bernd did you want add anything?

Bernd Leukert

Analyst · Nomura. Please go ahead

Yes. Maybe test from the product side, while it's still outlined, it’s a strategy for the company. It has significant impact on how we develop, what is the architect of product and then that resonates how we can deliver innovations to the market. Of course, the fact that we deliver the innovations to the cloud first is significantly accelerating adoption of the value by our customers and that is great to see that’s resonates us well in the financial numbers. Number two, it addresses as well a need from our customers to consolidate a very fragment that hit our channels landscape into a homogenous landscape where the platform is the key enabler and that is coming back to our previous question before that behind this success is a strong platform with capabilities not just as addition relational databases, these capabilities that outperform any competitive offering in any dimension.

Stefan Gruber

Management

Very good, thanks a lot. Let’s move to the next question please.

Operator

Operator

Next question is from the line of Knut Woller of Baader Bank. Please go ahead.

Knut Woller - Baader Bank

Analyst · Knut Woller of Baader Bank. Please go ahead

Yes. Thank you for taking my questions, it’s basically two. First one on the margin expansion, we have seen the 10 basis point margin expansion in the first quarter at constant currency and on acceleration to 60 basis points in the second quarter. So when we look at your full year targets, should we think about an ongoing margin expansion at the same extent as we have seen in the second quarter or will that moderate somehow? And then simply on Fieldglass, we have seen historical growth rates. As far as I remember you mentioned 30% to 40%, now it’s in the group you got a much broader scale of sales force, how should we think about the growth of Fieldglass going forward after you’ve integrated, will growth rate slightly accelerate or compared to historical rates or what’s you expectation here? Thank you.

Luka Mucic

CFO

Yeah. So first of all on the margin, as I said after the Q1 results of course it is always our ambition to increase our margin, but you should not extrapolate from an acceleration from 10 to 60 basis points that after Q3 it will be at 110 basis points and after Q4 at 160 basis points. I think we have the guidance out there to land between $5.8 billion to $6 billion operating income corridor and that’s what we are still committed to and what will then drive whatever we’ll achieve on the margin side. And in terms of the Fieldglass acceleration and please colleagues chime in there, we have a guidance out there and we have just increased it and the acceleration of Fieldglass as part of the SAP group for 2014 is in that guidance and any further acceleration will be in next year’s guidance.

Knut Woller - Baader Bank

Analyst · Knut Woller of Baader Bank. Please go ahead

Perfect.

Bill McDermott

CEO

Thank you. The one think I would tell you about Fieldglass is the focus that we have on the business network and the ability of SAP to scale things on an international and global level is not trivial. So we didn’t buy it to maintain its existing growth rate. Whenever we buy an asset it’s the best in the business and we do something special with it to accelerate growth and we expect that to happen with Fieldglass.

Knut Woller - Baader Bank

Analyst · Knut Woller of Baader Bank. Please go ahead

That’s very clear. Thank you.

Stefan Gruber

Management

Thank you. We have time for one final question, please.

Operator

Operator

And the next question is from the line of Philip Winslow. Please go ahead.

Philip Winslow - Credit Suisse Securities

Analyst · Philip Winslow. Please go ahead

Hi. Thanks guys for taking my questions and congrats on a good quarter. Bill, question to you, just getting through the numbers here and just looking across the geographies and it looks like you guys had a solid pickup in EMEA and also APJ, I wonder if you give some color on just sort of what you’re seeing across region, sort of what trends you’re seeing and as you kind of look into this second half, just what you’re thoughts based on sort of the first half and then the pipeline for the second half? Thanks.

Bill McDermott

CEO

Sure. Well, thank you very much for the question, Phil. We’re really proud of what’s going on in EMEA. I think the team is doing a fantastic job under the leadership of Rob Enslin and the same is also true for APJ, whether you look at mature market like Australia just doing unbelievable things or you look at markets like China which we’ve declared the second home taken off, we’re just solid. In the Americas the transition to the cloud particularly in the United States accelerates and that’s the number one focus for the United States is really to bare down with everything we’ve got on the cloud. In Latin America, we think there’s a lot of opportunity for all lines of business especially in places like Brazil, Mexico, Columbia and others. So we see a new tailwind here, Phil. I think that it would be safe to say that we’re starting to see SAP cylinders rare under fire on multiple dimensions now as opposed to a six cylinder car hitting on three. We’re now raving it up and we can see all of the cylinders starting to move in the right direction and that bodes well for our second half and full year confidence not to mention on mid-term 2017 and beyond strategy.

Philip Winslow - Credit Suisse Securities

Analyst · Philip Winslow. Please go ahead

Thank you very much. Got it. Thanks guys.

Stefan Gruber

Management

Thank you. This was the last question. Thank you. This concludes our Financial Analyst Call for today. Thank you all for joining and good bye.