SAP SE

Who owns SAP?

Public shareholders own SAP broadly. Founder Dietmar Hopp holds the largest individual stake at roughly 5 to 6 percent; BlackRock and other institutions hold large index positions.

Is SAP publicly traded?

Yes. It trades on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under ticker SAP, a DAX 40 component, and as a NYSE ADR under the same ticker.

Where is SAP headquartered?

Walldorf, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany, in the Rhine-Neckar region southwest of Frankfurt.

What does SAP make?

Enterprise application software: ERP (S/4HANA Cloud), human capital management (SuccessFactors), procurement (Ariba), travel and expense (Concur), and AI-powered business software (Joule).

How does SAP make money?

Cloud subscriptions are now the growth engine at roughly two-thirds of revenue, supplemented by declining software licenses and maintenance plus consulting services.

Who is the CEO of SAP?

Christian Klein, who became sole CEO in 2020 at age 39, the youngest CEO in DAX history. Dominik Asam serves as CFO.

Five IBM engineers left in April 1972 after their real-time processing project was cancelled and founded the company in Weinheim, Germany. The founding idea, process business data in real time rather than overnight batches, defined enterprise software for the next five decades.

R/2 made SAP a European standard in the 1980s; the 1992 launch of client-server R/3 made it a global one, and the 1998 NYSE listing funded the acquisition era. Business Objects (2007), Sybase (2010), SuccessFactors (2011), Ariba (2012), Concur (2014), Fieldglass, hybris, Callidus, and Qualtrics (2018) assembled a portfolio spanning every major business function, though the $8 billion Qualtrics purchase and subsequent partial divestiture by 2023 remains a debated capital-allocation episode.

The two foundational technology shifts were the HANA in-memory database (2010) and S/4HANA (2015), the cloud-native ERP suite rebuilt on it. RISE with SAP, launched in 2021, gave customers a commercial path off legacy installations, and by 2024 the company was restructuring around the transition, cutting roughly 8,000 roles in a program that concluded through 2025.

The payoff arrived visibly in 2025 and 2026: total revenue reached 36.8 billion euros in 2025 with net income of 7.3 billion euros; SAP overtook Novo Nordisk as Europe's most valuable company at points; the Joule AI copilot and Business AI offerings layered across the suite; WalkMe ($1.5 billion, 2024) and SmartRecruiters (2025) were acquired; and Q3 2026 delivered a record 10.27 billion euro quarter with a 24.1 billion euro cloud backlog. The current strategy brands the destination the Autonomous Enterprise, where AI agents execute business processes end to end.

SAP publishes an annual Integrated Report combining financial and ESG disclosure, one of the more rigorous such documents in software. Commitments include net-zero carbon emissions across the value chain by 2030, with Scope 1 to 3 targets, and it reports progress quarterly alongside financials. The company participates in CDP and has been listed in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for consecutive years. It also positions its software as an emissions-management tool, selling sustainability-tracking modules that let customers report their own ESG data.

The 2024 foreign bribery resolution is SAP's largest modern legal event: more than $220 million paid to DOJ and SEC to settle charges involving officials in South Africa, Indonesia, and Azerbaijan, part of the fallout from South Africa's state-capture investigations. The earlier TomorrowNow case cost a $1.3 billion jury verdict, negotiated to $272 million in a 2014 settlement over Oracle copyright infringement. The 2024 restructuring of roughly 8,000 roles generated worker-council friction in Germany, where co-determination gives employees formal influence. Periodic licensing and indirect-access disputes with customers over S/4HANA migration terms also draw scrutiny.