SAP cuts 2020 sales outlook citing Covid-19 impact on demand

The pandemic will delay SAP’s goals for cloud revenue, overall sales and operating profit by one or two years, especially in hard-hit industries, the German software company said in a statement on Sunday.

Chief Executive Officer Christian Klein, who became sole CEO in April, has been trying to navigate spending freezes from business customers trying to ride out the Covid-19 lockdowns this year. The warning came hours after governments in Spain and Italy unveiled further measures to try to rein in the virus’s spread.

The previous outlook “assumed economies would reopen and population lockdowns would ease, leading to a gradually improving demand environment in the third and fourth quarters,” SAP said in the statement. “Lockdowns have been recently re-introduced in some regions and demand recovery has been more muted than expected.”