SAP’s shares closed at €138.50 Friday, a 1.81% decline that leaves the stock just 5.89% above its 52-week low of €130.80 set in late June. The year-to-date slide of 33.53% underscores a brutal stretch for a company that saw its equity peak at €265.75 only last July. Even the completion of a strategic acquisition and the resolution of a long-running antitrust probe have failed to lift sentiment ahead of the critical quarterly report due on July 23.
The cloud-software giant inked a deal with Brussels early July to end the European Commission’s investigation into its maintenance and support practices. SAP committed for ten years to eliminate reactivation fees on on-premise licenses, a concession that the German-speaking SAP user group praised as enhancing customer freedom. That same period saw the closure of the Dremio acquisition, a data-lakehouse platform purchase aimed at strengthening data integration and accelerating the company’s “Agentic AI” capabilities — the very technology whose monetization is now under intense analyst scrutiny.
The divergence among sell-side experts is stark. UBS analyst Michael Briest trimmed his price target from €205 to €164 on July 13, retaining a buy rating, citing the “high complexity and delayed monetization of AI agents” among large customers. JPMorgan struck a more cautious note with a neutral rating and a €175 target. Morningstar’s Rob Hales, meanwhile, held his fair-value estimate at €265 and a buy recommendation, though he flagged macroeconomic risks tied to the Iran conflict and sector rotation away from technology. The differing views set up the July 23 results as a litmus test: the market consensus calls for 22% cloud revenue growth, and whether SAP meets or beats that figure will heavily influence how investors judge the payoff from the Dremio integration.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying SAP?
Alongside the earnings release at 22:05 MESZ and the analyst call an hour later, the company is wrapping up a share buyback program of up to €2.6 billion that runs through July 31. The repurchase should provide some technical support, but it does not address the structural valuation question — the stock now trades 21.46% below its 200-day moving average of €176.34.
In a separate move that may shape governance during the next phase of the AI push, SAP’s annual general meeting in May elected former Deutsche Telekom CEO René Obermann to the supervisory board with more than 99% approval. Obermann is slated to succeed Pekka Ala-Pietilä as chairman in 2027, a transition that will occur just as the success or failure of the Agentic AI strategy becomes clearer. The July 23 report will provide the first hard data on whether the operational progress in cloud and AI can reverse a stock price that has lost more than half its value from the peak.
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