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SAP SE
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Good morning, and welcome to SAP's Annual Press Conference. It's been quite a year. We have a lot of news for you. My name is Nicola Leske. I'm the Chief Communications Officer. I am joined by our Chief Executive Officer, Christian Klein, welcome; and our Chief Finance Officer, Luka Mucic, also a very warm welcome, both of you, gentlemen. This is our first virtual one. While we've had a couple of virtual events the past year, this is a new one. So we'll see how this goes. [Operator Instructions] So all of this will be recorded, and you can see the replay on our Investor Relations website. And with that, I think it's time to go and hear from our CEO, Christian. All yours.
Yes. Thank you, Nicola, and welcome to all of you to our Annual Press Conference. First of all, let me wish everyone a happy and even more important, a healthy New Year 2021. When I'm looking back on 2020, I can only say, what a year. Personally, I experienced definitely more events as in my 40 years before, becoming a CEO, and in the same night, a second-time father is already a lot, but we didn't rest. SAP is clearly on the move. Our strategy, we laid out, is in full execution, and we are moving with high speed. Before we go into the details, let me just share some key milestones. We did last year, one of the largest SAP transformations to build a more simple and customer-focused organization. We kept our promise and made big focus on integration of our acquired cloud products. We doubled down on innovation. We are co-innovating with our customers across 25 industries to turn them into more resilient, productive and sustainable enterprises. We just this week, launched RISE with SAP to drive the business transformation of our customers in a holistic manner, combined with our planned acquisition of Signavio. We also expanded the partnership with Microsoft Teams to foster collaboration and build together the frictionless enterprise. Just yesterday, we performed a very successful IPO of Qualtrics. I see Luka smiling next to me. We also welcomed 3 new Executive Board members with a strong cloud mindset and a geographical diversity, now from Australia all the way to the U.S. West Coast. So we can clearly say the Executive Board of SAP never sleeps. We also adjusted our financial guidance to not weigh short-term margin ambitions with the success of our customers and SAP. And even more important, we see already strong results out of this. Customer satisfaction is up 10 points, and we closed a very strong Q4. Luka will have the great pleasure to share all the great news about our financials in a minute. Here are the total year results in a nutshell. We beat all top line parameters, and we closed new order entry of almost EUR 10 billion in 2020. This will provide us a lot of tailwind leading into 2021. Cloud revenues was up by 18%. And if we back out our Intelligent Spend, travel and expense business, which is a tough sell in the pandemic, our cloud revenue is up 27%, representing a higher growth compared to many competitors out there. I'm also extremely grateful for the passion and the commitment of our over 100,000 SAP employees to serve our over 400,000 customers around the globe. In fact, we delivered stronger than ever. We added more than 25,000 net new customers. In the midst of the pandemic, we made 35,000 customers Go-Lives happen. We did run our mission-critical support and data centers with high resiliency. We're also clearly winning market share with S/4HANA. At the end of 2020, we counted more than 16,000 S4/HANA customers, up 16% over last year. We added customers like Gilead, Unilever, Shell, CureVac, and we closed more than 200 wins against Oracle in the ERP space. In procurement, we closed deals like General Motors and processed almost EUR 4 trillion of spend in our network. In Human Experience Management, we added many net new customers, and we are the only cloud vendor localized across 100 countries. In Customer Experience Management, we have closed the biggest quarter ever for order entry. For commerce, actually, we doubled our cloud revenue as only SAP can offer a seamless consumer experience from the online shop, next-day delivery and flexible payment terms. In supply chain, we expanded further our #1 market position, and we are further expanding as well our industry followed CRO capabilities to offer the autonomous factory. Personally, not sure about you, Luka, I would be okay if the upcoming year would be a bit less eventful. But clearly, we will act with the same speed and focus on our strategy. The direction is clear, executing on our strategy to reinvent how businesses run. Let me take you through the most important elements to outline how SAP will become an even more dominant cloud player in the market. We are on our way to focus SAP even more on customer success. We are putting more and more architects into the field to drive adoption of our solutions and platform. We are investing more in customer core innovation, and we changed the bonus plans of our people across SAP to drive a customer-first mindset. As a result, as I already mentioned, the customer satisfaction score increased by 10 points. Our vision is to help the world run better. So I'm very proud how SAP and our employees support global fight against COVID. In Germany, together with Deutsche Telekom, we developed the Corona-Warn-App. The app was downloaded more than 25 million times. 2,000 people share positive test results every day. This helps tremendously to break the chain of infection. For vaccine production, 17 of the top 20 global vaccine producers run SAP. We are now helping Moderna, CureVac, the German Red Cross and many others to scale the vaccine production and make the logistics work in times of country lockdowns. This also shows SAP's relevance in the global value chain and how we help the world to run better. Two days ago, we launched RISE with SAP. This is a game-changing offering. We listened with empathy to our customers to understand their needs and challenges in the pandemic. And it clearly told us, in order to become a more resilient, productive and sustainable enterprise. This requires more than just a technical migration to the cloud because only with the technical migration, no single business process will become more intelligent. With the new offering, we are going to ensure a holistic business transformation of our customers, and only SAP can do that. Let me briefly go into a bit of details. RISE with SAP is an offer for large and small customers, no matter of their common size and complexity of the ERP landscape. Our goal is to transform every customer into a leading intelligent enterprise of their industry. RISE with SAP is a continuous business transformation journey consisting of 3 elements: First, we are spanning a business process intelligence layer across our market-leading applications to make our -- to make sure our customers adapt new digital business models and run intelligent and highly automated business processes. Our acquisition of Signavio was the missing piece in the puzzle. I will come to that in a second. As a second element, we embed automated services in RISE with SAP to reduce system modifications and move to a standard and modular solution landscape so that our customers can enjoy accelerated time to value. As a third element, we embedded the intelligent enterprise, including the world's leading ERP solution, S/4HANA cloud, free access to the world's largest business network, the Business Technology Platform, as key foundation for integration and extensibility based on one data model and many other world-class application services, and we offered the choice to run the landscape in an SAP or hyperscaler data center. Our new offering is delivering our customers a superior business outcome and return on invest, in a very simple commercial offer on a single contract with one accountable party and this is SAP, all without high upfront investments and up to a 20% lower TCO. From a financial perspective, we made the following decision end of Q3. We put the success of our customers first. We don't weigh the success of our customers for short-term margin optimization. We are shifting existing customers out of the upfront software and support model into a ratable cloud subscription model to accelerate the growth in the cloud and establish SAP as one of the largest cloud companies in the world. Let's come to business process intelligence and our acquisition of Signavio. With the acquisition of Signavio, we are becoming right away, the leading player in the business process intelligence market. Together with the insights and best practices from our 400,000 customers across 25 industries, we will support our customers to continuously reinvent how business processes run, by analyzing, benchmarking and configuring business processes. And at the same time, we will infuse intelligence by embedding artificial intelligence and RPA. With business process intelligence, we will accelerate the business transformation of our customers, and with that, their move to S/4HANA cloud. Let's move on to the extended partnership with Microsoft. As part of our strategy, we are also forming a strong partner ecosystem. With Microsoft Teams and SAP coming together, we combine the leading business application suite with the leading business communication platform. We are going to create the frictionless enterprise and determine the future of work. We will deliver numerous collaboration scenarios for end users in procurement, HR, finance, sales, and we will increase the productivity of millions of end users worldwide. The first use cases will be already launched in Q2, starting with S/4HANA and customer experience. Now let's come to Qualtrics. This is a fantastic success story for both Qualtrics and SAP, and it resulted in yesterday's successful IPO of Qualtrics. Let me be clear. Why Zig and myself are fully committed to XM as part of the SAP solution portfolio. We will keep up the pace of innovation, new joint solution quarter after quarter. SAP will, of course, remain important go-to-market and innovation partner to drive growth within SAP's customer base. But now we will also provide Qualtrics the opportunity to extend its business, serve customers beyond the SAP universe. So far, Qualtrics, the future couldn't be brighter. But let's also remember, we acquired Qualtrics just 2 years ago for around $8 billion. Last year, they contributed more than EUR 500 billion of cloud revenue, twice of what they did when we acquired them. Yesterday's IPO put them at a valuation of around $18 billion, more than twice than the purchase price we paid 2 years ago. Congratulations, Ryan and team, on a great, great job as part of the SAP family. Now before handing over to Luka, 2021 will be an exciting year, full of opportunities. And I'm happy to enter this important year with a very strong leadership team, underscoring our clear focus on customer success and cloud growth. First, I would like to thank Adaire, who will depart SAP. We wish her all the best for her future endeavors. At the same time, I could not be happier to announce the addition of 2 exceptional leaders to our Executive Board. Scott Russell succeeds Adaire in heading customer success. Under Scott's leadership as President for APJ, the region has become one of the fastest-growing cloud market for SAP. But with Scott in the lead, they also put it always the success of our customers at the center. Julia White. Julia will join us from Microsoft. Julia led the product marketing for Microsoft Office during the transition to Office 365 and for Azure over the past 5 years. Julia will take on a new Executive Board role as SAP's Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer. Julia brings a cloud-first mindset that will tremendously help us to support our transformation. She knows perfectly how to bridge the technology, the product innovations of SAP with the business value of our customers. At SAP, she will focus on demonstrating the differentiating capabilities of our solutions to our customers by strengthening our product, industry and digital marketing capabilities. And I would also like to extend a warm welcome to Julia and Scott and also, of course, once again to Sabine Bendiek. Sabine joined our Executive Board on January 1 as our Chief People Officer. Sabine was the driving force behind Microsoft Cloud transformation in Germany. And as we all know, transformations are driven by winning people and challenging culture. It is all about the right talent, the right leadership, the right attitudes and also the right processes. So I couldn't be happier and more confident to hand over to Sabine, the role as Chief Operating Officer later this year. So this is our Executive Board available around the sun, 24/7. And with that, let me wrap it up here and hand it over to you, Luka.
Yes. Thank you very much Christian. So to say, from new Board members to the old Board member, and I'm not sure what actually drove our IR team to put on this interesting picture, but I can only reassure you, I won't turn the back on you. Now obviously, I'm this year entering my 26th year with SAP. And I can certainly attest that I had never a dull moment, but I must also say that 2020, also for me, was unprecedented in terms of the amount of challenges to be overcome and the amount of change that we had to absorb. But I'm likewise, therefore, even more proud of how we ultimately managed to overcome those challenges and deliver another successful year for SAP. I don't want to go through every number that you see on this slide, but I want to spend a few minutes on 4 key highlights that I see in our performance in 2020. First of all, it was extremely positive for us to see how we rallied in Q4 and to deliver very strong results for the company amid a lot of uncertainty and certainly heightened COVID activities that we saw unfolding as we were getting through fall and into winter. And because of this, I'm even more proud that we actually ultimately managed to not only exceed our revised guidance for total revenues and operating profit, but we actually came in again within the guidance range that we had set in April at the outset of the pandemic, which, given all of the volatility in the market, is really a very decent result. Now we did not quite achieve the same result to get back into our April guidance range for cloud revenues. But for me, cloud growth is nevertheless a second highlight that I want to stress. Not only did we grow our entire cloud business by 18% to now more than EUR 8.2 billion, but we actually grew our Software as a Service portfolio by 27%, and this is really spectacular growth given the circumstances. Cloud is now more than twice the size of our software license business. And it has helped us to propel the share of our predictable revenues to 72% of total revenues. In that context, let me also spend a word on recognizing the great success that we had with the Qualtrics IPO. Yesterday, it was obviously the culmination of a lot of great work that Ryan Smith, Zig Serafin and the entire Qualtrics team, together with SAP, across so many different functions of the company, have achieved in the last 2 years. Qualtrics is a fast-growth company that has excellent opportunities for the future. And this has been rightfully considered and recognized with yesterday at the close a USD 27 billion market capitalization. And let me be clear, Qualtrics deserves every single dime and penny of this market capitalization. At the same time, I believe that this great success of Qualtrics gives us also an opportunity to reflect on the true value of the SAP broader cloud business. While Qualtrics is a great growth asset, it still represents less than 10% of our entire cloud business. In our Software as a Service business, which has grown very fast, as I said, in 2020, we have a variety of assets both acquired as well as organically developed assets that are operating at a similar scale and similar pace as Qualtrics. I just want to cite a few here like S/4HANA Cloud, like our commerce portfolio and customer experience or our Business Technology Platform portfolio in the cloud. This is a combined business that is running today at around about USD 5.5 billion. And if you would apply yesterday's multiples out of the market capitalization of Qualtrics to this business portfolio, it would actually already justify the entire market cap of SAP, despite the fact that this, as well, only represents around about 20% of our entire business. So I truly believe that Qualtrics will help us to crystallize the true underlying value of our business and gives us an opportunity to justify a re-rating of the SAP share. Third, I'm very proud about the bottom line performance of SAP. I will spend a few words on this later on. But fourth and equally important, we have been for a long time, a believer in integrated steering of the company and the importance of nonfinancial metrics. Christian has already cited our great success on the customer satisfaction front in 2020. For me, it's also very important that our employees showed us their trust and their engagement like never before with a record employee engagement score that we had amid the crisis in 2020. We have increased our share of women in management and are well on track to reach our targets of 30% women in management by 2022. And last but not least, we also remain very focused on our carbon performance. Obviously, 2020 was helped by the absence of business travel in this respect. But we remain committed to being not only in exemplar, but also a strong enabler of the carbon performance of our customer base with new offerings like Climate 21. So let me spend a few words on our regional performance, which was actually in 2020, very consistent and quite solid across all of the regions. Both in Americas and in EMEA, we posted annual growth of 3% at constant currencies for our cloud and software revenue business. In APJ, it was 2% at constant currencies. Within that, obviously, our cloud business in EMEA and APJ, which is still scaling from a lower base, had been posting stronger growth of 25% or 21%, respectively. While in Americas, where we have already a large-scale, we grew by 13% at constant currencies. It should be noted as well that our businesses in Intelligent Spend, like Concur, which were particularly challenged in 2020 given the COVID circumstances at a higher base in North America, whereas our organically developed solutions like S/4HANA Cloud and others are more equally distributed across the regions, which undoubtedly helped the stronger performance in EMEA and APJ as well. From a individual markets perspective, I only want to say here that across the regions, we had lots of positive contributors. But what I find noteworthy is that, in particular, our largest markets, the U.S., Germany and in Asia, particularly Japan, with positive growth in both licenses and in cloud, had a very strong showing. Just a few words on the bottom line of the company, which, as I said, is something that I'm really proud of because despite headwinds that we were facing on the top line, we were again, in 2020, continuing a trend that we had seen already in the 2 years before, able to increase the gross margins across all of our individual business models. That holds for cloud, as you can see here on this slide, it holds for all of the individual areas in the cloud, the Intelligent Spend group, private cloud as well as public cloud. But it also holds for our combined software licenses and support business, which managed to edge up another 30 basis points despite already the very high profitability that we see in this space, and which was really stellar in our services business. We managed to increase gross margins by 2 percentage points, which, given the circumstances, is also very outstanding. And this increased efficiency on the gross margin line also translated into a very strong performance from an operating margin perspective. We ultimately actually ended up at constant currencies with a margin of 30.5% for the full year, which is the highest level that we have seen since 2015. And very importantly, we did not achieve this operating margin by cutting cost. Of course, we were cautious and disciplined, in particular, with discretionary expenses such as T&E, which obviously came down given the travel lockdowns and other discretionary expense items, but we continued to invest in our people. Very importantly, we grew by 2,100 full-time equivalents in 2020. And the lion's share of this, more than 1,900, were new engineers in research and development to continue to propel our innovation agenda. Now finally, let me spend a few words on 2 of the very bright spots of our set of results. One is the net profit and earnings per share line, where we grew even faster than on an operating profit level, with IFRS earnings per share up by 56% and non-IFRS earnings per share up by 6%. This was aided by a very strong performance, in particular, of our venture capital, from Sapphire Ventures, which in 2020, posted record results, which were very positively reflecting on our financial income. On the cash flow side, I have to say that I did not expect, given how we started the year and the uncertainty around COVID, that we would post a record cash flow in every single quarter as well as for the full year of 2020. We ended up substantially above the guidance and expectations that we had set at the beginning of the year, which were already considered ambitious by quite a few participants. We knew at the outset of the year that we would be supported by lower restructuring cash outflows as well as lower income tax payments. But what then came on top was just simply outstanding working capital management and very, very effective cash collections, which drove free cash flow up by 164% year-over-year. So kudos to the entire organization across all functions that made that happen. Finally, to close us out. Just a quick look on our outlook, where you can actually take 3 key points with you. One is we believe that our cloud business will reaccelerate. We came from a very strong Q4 order entry. So we believe that we will see in Q1 a trough in terms of the growth of our cloud business. And then from there on, we'll start to reaccelerate. Cloud will more and more becoming the dominating line item in our P&L in 2021, already to the tune of 3x our software licenses revenues. And this will drive our more predictable revenues up, to around about 75%. We, obviously, will, therefore, see, through the business model transformation and the higher mix of recurring versus upfront revenues, muted growth in 2021. But the transformation and the re-acceleration that we expect to fully kick in as of the second quarter will set us up for stronger growth in the years to come. And we fully expect that as we guided for in October, from 2023 onwards, we will see SAP returning to double-digit growth territory, both on the top line as well as on the operating profit line. Finally, we continue to expect a strong cash flow performance also in 2021, roughly at the levels that we had originally contemplated and planned for 2020. So SAP will continue to be solid. It will be poised for growth. It will invest properly into those growth opportunities, into transformation of our customers in core ERP to the cloud, in the new industry cloud solutions, in business process intelligence and other growth drivers of the company to set us up for a sustainable growth for many years and a re-acceleration of that growth profile from an already very high base. With that, let me hand it over back to Nicola, and I'm looking forward to your questions.
And I'm on mute. It's like the thing of virtual meetings, I'm a mute. Anyway, thank you, Luka and Christian. Let me say this again, this is a great overview.
We're going to go to the questions. As mentioned before, please pose your questions in the tool, we would get to them in the order they come in. We've got just about half an hour to take your questions. So let's jump on in. I'm going to give this first one to you, Christian. It's from Den Howlett at Diginomica. Christian said at RISE event 2 days ago, some 130 firms trialed the offering by year's end. What percentage moved to full contract? And what are SAP's expectations around the impact of RISE in 2021? And also, Americas showed significant decline. What is SAP's plan to rejuvenate that market?
So on RISE with SAP. First of all, before we launched this offering, as you can already see, we already have 130 pilot customers. Actually, we started that 9 months ago. And we first listened to our customers, what is their need? And many chief information officers out there told me, Christian, I see so much technology. But somehow, I cannot connect the technology to the business processes I'm running. And just because I'm moving now my IT landscape to the cloud, I'm not having more intelligent business processes. I'm also not adapting new digital business models. And this is how we created this new offering. Because now we can go and tell our customers, look, Luka just talked about the cash flow. We have 5,000 of examples on what works for order to cash and what doesn't work so well. We can use these insights. We can use these best practices, benchmark it, reconfigure the business process and make sure actually that you drive a higher cash flow going forward. And this is about RISE with SAP. This is not only about moving to a cloud infrastructure. It's not only about hardware. And all of the 130 customers, they are consuming this offering end-to-end. Again, they have choice on the cloud infrastructure. They have the world's leading ERP solution with S/4HANA Cloud. They use the platform heavily for integration, where we made great strides. And they can also move to a standard landscape because we all know, in ERP, these are mission-critical processes, complex processes. So extensibility is key. And now the ecosystem can join the party because now they find all the business application services all of our apps are using. So it's so easy, so seamless now to extend also our application portfolio. And that's RISE with SAP. It's really about making sure our customers see the outcome, the return of the investment into our software, but of course, also in today investments into the cloud infrastructure. And if you allow me, Nicola, and then Luka, I would like to turn over the question about North America to you. I guess what we also have seen in the past, there was a customer calling me 4 weeks before Christmas, and he told me, Christian, somehow the performance of my system landscape doesn't work. And I'm not sure, is it now the hyperscaler infrastructure, is it my cloud operations partner, or is it SAP? It was not SAP. But where to go to when your Christmas peak season is at risk. And with RISE with SAP, there's one accountable party. There's one contract, and we will take care of that. Let's not forget that this is also a very, very competitive pillar in this new offering. Luka?
Just on the question around North America. I think you need to understand that the cloud revenue performance, in particular, that might be the source of your question, whether there is a need to rejuvenate that market is actually a result of the past. And of course, North America is a very large-scale base. And as I said during my remarks, was also at the beginning of the pandemic, particularly hard hit by some of the U.S.-originated assets around Concur that had a particularly tough stance given the space that they're operating in. However, there is actually nothing really to be rejuvenated about this market anymore because in the second half year, North America had actually among the best performances of our regions when the new order entry is concerned. Actually, the U.S. was able to show positive growth in software licenses and also had a very strong cloud order entry performance. Canada was one of our strongest market performance in cloud revenues. And so with that order entry that we have achieved already. And now the wave of RISE with SAP and the new initiatives that we're driving, we're very confident in our business in North America. And the U.S. has actually proven to be very resilient for us all the way through the second half year.
Thank you, Luka. Maybe you could touch on the rest of Americas too? Because I think that was part of the question, too.
Yes, absolutely. First of all, of course, the rest of Americas is relatively small compared to North America. And as you know, Latin America has really had a high share of struggles in 2020. Brazil is among the countries that has the highest share of COVID infections. Despite that, actually, we fared relatively well against our internal expectations, which were already adjusted for this difficult economic climate. The same certainly applies for Mexico, and those 2 markets are obviously the lion's share of what is happening in Latin America. So we are actually quite satisfied with the performance against internal objectives. But you cannot disregard the environment, and that was a very difficult one for well-known reasons.
Thank you, Luka. I'm going to give the next one to you as well. Marco Engemann from dpa-AFX business newswire wants to know. Will there be a revaluation gain booked due to the Qualtrics IPO? And if so, to which magnitude?
Yes, that's a good question. So first of all, let me be clear. We are not holding Qualtrics as a financial investment. I mean this is a fully consolidated subsidiary of SAP, in which we hold the vast majority the outstanding shares. And as such, it is not showing up in our finance income, like the venture capital investments that we are doing but any valuation step-ups are not going to show up in the P&L, but are actually going to show up in our balance sheet. So that is an important statement to make. So for us, the way more important aspect is on the one part, obviously, the success that we had with the IPO translating in very attractive proceeds for SAP, and then more how we set up with the IPO of Qualtrics for continued scale and for fast growth because that ultimately will then show up in our P&L as we fully consolidate Qualtrics.
All right. Thank you, Luka. Next question is for you, Christian, from Michael [indiscernible] at DPA. The SAP stock price collapsed this year, where actually it was last year, how long will it take to reach the old highs? And what are the requirements to achieve the targets?
Yes. I mean after the end of Q3, you can already see that we are on a good track also to come back. And I mean, Luka, I guess you referred today that, first of all, customer satisfaction is up. And I'm a big believer in what -- when you do what is right for your customers, also the financial success will follow. I guess you will also see now as part of our new strategy, that we're also bringing now our cloud assets together. It's about integrating, but it's also about innovation on our platform, and of course, also driving new growth opportunities for SAP. We relaunched our industry initiative. We are reinventing the way how a retailer runs in traditional stores, omnichannel, we are going automotive. We announced an automotive alliance, where a lot of large OEMs already joined, including the suppliers, to digitize the supply chain to manage in a very volatile market demand and supply, this is SAP. It's about organic innovation and the complete focus on the success of our customers. And the rest will follow. And in that sequence, we also want to manage SAP going forward.
Wonderful. Thank you, Christian. Next one is for Luka again from [Stefan Bauer ] at [indiscernible] Why do you plan to put parts of the Qualtrics IPO proceeds in debt repayments? Wouldn't it be more conducive in terms of shareholder value to invest harder in your cloud strategy?
Yes. That's also an important question, but let me be clear. I mean we are investing very hard in our cloud strategy. We have actually announced that over the course of the next 2 years, in addition to all of the R&D investments that we are putting into different parts of our cloud solution portfolio, we are spending a mid-triple-digit million euro amount on modernizing our cloud infrastructure and harmonizing it on one common infrastructure stack, which will allow us then later on in the years from 2023 to have a massive step-up in efficiency, and therefore, also in cloud gross margins. So rest assured, we are heavily investing into growth in the cloud. That being said, nevertheless, if you have debt and it's coming up for repayment, then you need to do so. Of course, you could take out more debt to finance your old debt, but I don't want to create a snowball system at SAP. We will have to pay back EUR 1.25 billion in outstanding Qualtrics term loans for the acquisition that we did 2 years ago. We have another EUR 1.4 billion of debt from bonds that we took out previously that are scheduled for repayment. And we will do so. Obviously, it's not only about the Qualtrics IPO proceeds. As I said before, we had a very strong cash flow in 2020. So we have ample room to do those debt repayments, while at the same time, still aggressively investing into our growth strategy and at the same time, also paying out a decent return to our shareholders, which we absolutely intend to do.
Thank you, Luka. So we have next question -- well several questions from Alexander Winkler at [indiscernible]. And I know you'd like to have these in German, but please understand that this has to be in English, so everyone can understand. There are whole bunch of questions, so we're just going to take one after the other from Mr. Winkler. So we'll start with you, Christian. Except for Mr. Mucic, Mr. Muller and Mr. Klein, no Board member of the Bill McDermott era is still on board. Middle management also saw a change. Is the restructuring of the management now done?
Yes, absolutely. And when you look now at the Executive Board of SAP, I mean, honestly spoken, I cannot be more delighted that the Supervisory Board selected now Julia to join us. She will come with an incredible strong cloud mindset and asset what -- where all of our customers in SAP will benefit from. Sabine is now with us since a few weeks, and it feels already since years. She is doing a great job. And also as the Board bonds of APJ, I know Scott in and out, and I know that he's exactly the right energetic leader to also then make the numbers work. So I feel very, very strong about the new setup. And on top, when you look underneath, I mean, we have an incredibly strong talent bench. I mean, Qualtrics, without any doubt, the best management team in the Experience Management category. We have, in the U.S., incredible strong leaders. We have Paula Hansen heading CX, fantastic warder. We have in human resources, 3 fantastic colleagues with Jill Popelka, with McBee and Amy Wilson. So we are set up around the globe, and we are a truly global company. And we are also now a very diverse company from agenda, but also from a geographical perspective.
This is true. All right. We'll continue here with Mr. Winkler's question. SAP wants to do EUR 36 billion revenue by 2025, Salesforce wants to do EUR 40 billion by then. What is holding SAP back?
Let me start, Luka, and then you can build on that. First of all, I don't want to comment so much on competitors. But I also don't see the need that SAP is now -- has to urgently buy revenue or acquire revenue. As you have seen with Microsoft, we are building wider strong partnerships to really build market-leading solutions with great outcomes for our customer. And then organic innovation. And our engineering team is fully ramped up. I see the pipeline is full of innovation and that's the way to go. And then also in all fairness, you also have to see our installed base is a gift. We learn so much every day from 400,000 customers, I can tell you. But it's also a matter of fact that SAP is going on the business model transformation. So we are moving, migrating customers from an upfront license model to be growing cloud subscription revenue model. And we have seen yesterday with the IPO of Qualtrics that, that is not such a bad thing to do with regard to growth, but also with regard to the market cap of the company. So it makes totally sense, but we also have to make sure that when we compare companies, natively born in the cloud with a big software player like SAP that this is not always apples-to-apples. And again, I'm absolutely confident that we will see accelerate -- even further accelerated growth. Our growth in the cloud is stellar. If you're going to back out our travel and expense business, then actually, we are already growing at a very high rate. And with RISE with SAP, with the innovations coming, we will further accelerate the growth. And once the transition is done, also from on-prem to cloud, we even see double-digit growth on total revenue.
There is hardly anything that I can add other than that any given year is only a point of time. What we are working on is to set SAP up in a way that in many years to come, we actually have the potential to grow in double digits. And that's what we will actually achieve with the business model transformation. And therefore, it's really for the long term that we're building the company up not for a given year and for any artificial comparisons.
Thank you, Luka, and we're going to stick with you for the next question. Luka Mucic said there might be a higher dividend after the successful IPO of Qualtrics. What will the dividend look like?
Yes. Here, I need to ask you to accept that I have to respect our governance, our dividend will be proposed formally at our Supervisory Board meeting in February, and then will be ultimately resolved by our shareholders, obviously. But having said this, we have an established policy that we want to pay out more than 40% of our net profit in IFRS terms. Obviously, our IFRS net profit has been growing very strongly in 2020. I've mentioned the 56% earnings per share growth. And so I think the safe assumption is that we are going to propose an increasing dividend to the Supervisory Board. Everything else and the exact size is really subject to their discretion and decision, and we will update you as soon as that decision has been taken in February.
Thank you. So stay tuned for that decision. Next question comes from Brian McKenna at Computer Weekly. To what extent should we think of RISE as a way to speed up S/4HANA Cloud adoption? And how does it compare and contrast with Leonardo? Christian?
So indeed, and I get these questions a lot, and there's no secret about that. Of course, with RISE with SAP, we are going to accelerate the adoption of S/4HANA cloud. And again, we are building this business process intelligence layer on top to make the business case even more attractive going forward. Because you can go with a PowerPoint to a customer and can tell him about all the great things you're doing. You can, of course, also bring other customers to the customer and convince him, but what is even more powerful is to show him based on data, based on insights, based on best practices from large, large installed base on how do the business processes work best in his industry. And this is very important, and this is what we are going to do. Because the technology is there, the technology, the artificial intelligence is in there. And with Leonardo, the positioning was a little bit outside of our applications. But we -- everything what we need to do in SAP has to be always in the context of our customers of the business process to really show them the outcome right away. I have now a customer with S/4HANA, for example, we can predict with an extremely high occupancy exactly how his P&L will develop. Instead of asking 1,000 FP&A colleagues, he is now getting predictions, which are actually close to the point. And we are doing this with S/4HANA, with real time analytics, we are doing this, of course, with infusing further artificial intelligence into his business processes and finance. And these are the business scenarios which are convincing our customers to move. And again, I also want to say one point with regard to S/4HANA, I mean we are also doing our internal benchmarks, obviously, obviously, also with S4/HANA. But what we are seeing is actually that the adoption curve is extremely good. The customer satisfaction of S/4HANA is an all-time high, much better even than compared to previous ERP versions of SAP. So that's also for me, again, always a leading indicator that the adoption is high, that the customer satisfaction is high. And with the new offering, yes, we will definitely also see an acceleration towards S/4HANA Cloud.
Thank you, Christian. And that's a great segue to the next question from Christof Kerkmann, Handelsblatt. Would you please break out some details about S4/HANA Cloud such as revenue, operating profit, number of customers signed up In-Live?
Yes. So first of all, we obviously intend now with the launch of RISE to going forward, provide even more transparency about the momentum in our S/4 business. This will start to happen as of the first quarter of 2021. For now, I can tell you directionally that S/4HANA Cloud is already approaching a cloud revenue run rate of EUR 800 million. It actually already has around about 3,300 customers, out of which close to 2,000 are live, and that is building up very, very quickly. So the rate of adoption of S/4 Cloud versus on-premise already in 2020 was at a totally different level than in prior years. And obviously, with RISE with SAP, this will now achieve much different rate of adoption in a very short time frame.
Thank you, Luka. Next question comes from Alexander [indiscernible] How many customers will switch to cloud-based HANA -- S/4HANA this year? And what is your target figure?
I mean I can start and you can build on top, Luka. I mean, first of all, as Luka already mentioned, the S/4HANA cloud adoption is really accelerating. And of course, we see the predominant share of our customers already moving to S/4HANA Cloud. The product is getting better and better. We have now superior capabilities embedded. And as I also showed in my keynote, I mean, we have customers like Siemens, of course, large customers with kind of complex system landscape who are going to move with SAP to S/4HANA Cloud. And on the other side, we have smaller customers, like LIVEKINDLY. They just did recently a few acquisitions, they want to now globalize their business. They're using the solution to go right away into the public cloud and scale and grow their business in a massive way. And so everyone is invited, everyone is going to be served with our solution. And this is why we're going to see also a further acceleration of S/4HANA cloud.
Mr. [indiscernible] has a follow-up question -- or second part of the question. Why hasn't SAP developed its own business process intelligence projects in the recent past? Are you planning other deals like Signavio this year, Luka?
Yes, I can get started. So first of all, we are excited about the prospects that we have in business process intelligence. I think the idea of having a holistic business process management suite that allows you to design your processes, benchmark them against best practices, then understand how the actual execution of processes fares against the theoretical design, then overcoming inefficiencies through automation has a lot of appeal and tremendous business value. And it's now the right time to focus on this and double down on this as we are with RISE with SAP now really taking our customers and overcoming the breaks in their processes based on legacy systems while moving them to the cloud and modernizing their enterprise architecture across our intelligent enterprise applications, including S/4HANA. That's a key driver of doubling down on this, but it does not mean that we have been silent and on the sidelines with regard to building our portfolio. An actual fact, we have as part of our innovation center network focused on organic solutions that are now hitting the market. Around the same time as we hopefully will close then soon the Signavio acquisition, we are going to launch the general availability of our solution portfolio around user behavior, mining as well as benchmarking, which is also part already of the RISE with SAP offerings, so that customers can get a very quick overview of the business value that they can draw from the migration to SAP S/4HANA. We also have already, on the automation front, a very strong offering around automation through robotic process automation, through workflow solutions and are now also focused on building out our capabilities around low code -- no-code capabilities. And that's what also excited Signavio in our discussions that we actually can together come up very fast with an out-of-the-box natively integrated end-to-end business process transformation suite. They did not have the capabilities around automation as well as user behavior mining so far. We get from Signavio, very strong and leading capabilities around process design and modeling and governance around it as well as a very robust solution around process mining. And with that, we are going to be propelled into immediate market leadership. So this is a combination of strong assets and not that we have to buy an entire suite from the market.
Nothing to add, beautifully explained.
Just one more -- the second part of the question, any more acquisitions planned like Signavio?
Not in this space, for sure not. And as Christian has said, we are really focused on an organic growth strategy, augmented where it makes sense by tuck-in acquisitions such as Signavio or also last year, Emarsys. But certainly, in this space, we have now everything that we need for an end-to-end solution.
Excellent. We've got 3 more questions, with first one from [indiscernible]. Considering the very successful IPO of Qualtrics, you intend to keep a long-term interest in the company, but would you consider selling some of your shares -- some more shares to increase free float and maybe raise some more cash for SAP?
Yes. Let me take this very briefly. I mean, as we said all along, we are committed to remaining the clear majority owner of Qualtrics for a very, very long time. We have not yet made any decisions for further follow-ons after the very successful IPO. And so while we will, of course, continue to evaluate options there, you should not expect any short-term massive sell-offs of SAP because we believe in the opportunity and the potential of the combination of Qualtrics and SAP and remain committed to that vision. So we are not seeing Qualtrics as our money pot, so to say, to grab into. We are a way more interested in further helping them and helping each other to maximize our opportunities in the marketplace.
Okay. Thank you. Next one is from Peter Farbinger at E-3 Magazine. As far as I understand, RISE with SAP equals a one face to the customer approach. But doesn't that change SAP's entire business model? Doesn't every single job now have to be reorganized?
Peter. I mean -- and that question also came in the Q&A after the keynotes. So first of all, RISE with SAP is the most ecosystem-friendly offer, I guess, SAP has ever launched. Because we give customers choice on the cloud infrastructure, as I mentioned, but of course, to all of our services partners. So they can argument this offering with great business advisory service. They have -- of course, they will offer the business implementation services. And as I also mentioned before, on the platform now, we are going to build up an even more massive ecosystem of partners, building new IP on our platform to extend solutions. So SAP cannot and will not develop everything by our own. We cannot sell everything by our own, and we can also not service every single customer across the globe. So the ecosystem is super, super important to us. And this is why we also have a huge focus on them, yes.
Excellent. And that brings us to our last question from [indiscernible] at Reuters. How many of you about 16,000 S4/HANA customers are using S/4HANA Cloud?
Well, I think I answered this already, almost 3,300.
That was a nice short brief answer to our last question. This concludes our press conference today. Thank you for joining. Thank you for participating. Thank you for your many questions. Luka and Christian, thank you for your time, and I think you've got an analyst call this afternoon. So you still have some work to do. Thank you, everybody, and stay safe.
Thank you. All the best. Bye-bye.
Thank you very much. Bye-bye.