Thread regarding SAP layoffs

@ak Exactly. The power centre is well and truly back in Germany, there’s loyal execs who are there to pump the share price and make a personal fortune doing it.

I’m amazed people still bring up statements from a few years ago about small restructuring programs and only 2%. None of that was longer valid 10 seconds after it was said. We’re following the other tech companies approach, and if you do a comparison with most of the others, we are still way overstaffed.

@d5 That is another rumor.

I appreciate this forum for the facts and pieces of data I get, as well as for informed opinions. But not rumors.

There is a lot of justified criticism of the board, but money laundering?

They are not stupid enough to do something that would send them to jail.

@OP It's obvious that SAP wants to "look" young and fresh so now it wants to get rid of the "old" generation of engineers and employees because they became costlier and their ROI, with the rise of AI, is considered low for the future.

The problem is that it's not so easy because a lot of these engineers are now the only experts in their area and the company is still tied to customers through maintenance contracts.

SAP just hope they'll leave by themselves if SAP makes their life less comfortable with decisions like:
No training
No pay rise
No promotion
...etc

But these old folks have families and bills to pay so they resist and they will resist no matter what knowing that if they leave it's hard to start over at their age...

So what now ?

SAP is just delaying the decision because it will have to pay them anyways at least so they can do KT to low cost engineers in low cost centers (Brazil, India, China...etc)

@OP do they, or can they, include in “restructuring charges” all of these castaways who come back from failing elsewhere & get big “disloyalty raises upon returning? Has anyone closely examined goodwill amortization (e.g. bad acquisitions) possible overlap with restructuring charges ?

@bt you mean the same audit and consultants who undersigned FTX, Thesarus, Enron,Bernie Maddof for +20 years to name a few.. Apart from Maddoff, most of them were audited by allegedly the reputable auditors. I am mo means claiming that there is a fraud going on but also stating that a company is audited to ensure that there can be no fraud is just categorically wrong.

The real thing mission the layoff topic is transparency. This board keeps everything secret and doesn't care if this approach is ki-ling employee trust and engagement. In 2024 they announced 10000 roles to be impacted, no official numbers and impacted working areas or regions were shared. In summer this year DA introduced the toothbrushing exercise, every year 1/2% of employees would be impacted and they started to let go people 1 month later. So they keep it vague and with no details shared so that they can play with us, little numbers with no meaning, anytime they want.

@ak The real problem is were boxed in by technical choices made many decades ago that don't allow core sap to ever truly be "cloud" so we stuck selling on prem software hosted on other companies cloud infrastructure at very high costs whilst new companies can start to eat away specific niches building from scratch. There never going to eat everything as just like IBM the very large companies are to broad to be susceptible to those niche players. But this does mean we are now a mature low growth company scrabbling around to try and justify our stock price. The problem is we keep buying younger firms and then forcing them to do things the SAP way which cripples those companies as well rather than learning from them and working out how to migrate the crown jewels away from an on prem model and move them to a modern scalable architecture.

@bt well, where did the “3.1 billion euros” go then? I can’t find anything on it in the press or any public documents. And it feels unusually high for 3000 employees laid off.

Also this begs another question. If they’re trying to lay off another €15000 employees, is that an additional cost of 15.5 billion Euros? That’s a big chunk of the cloud backlog and SAP doesn’t have this kind of money to spend as all spare cash is used for buybacks.

The external accountants would reveal any form of money-laundering. Also, please keep in mind that lots of stuff is exposed to the press, potentially from works council circles.

Therefore, the idea that money disappears in dark channels is nothing but an unsubstantiated rumor.

Be better. Don't spread rumors.

Let’s be real: “transformation” is just the latest excuse. Every few years a new leadership team shows up, declares the company broken, hires pricey consultants, reshuffles org charts, cuts staff, and calls it vision — while the real problems stay untouched.

Honestly, I’m always surprised how surprised people are by the same old boys’ club behavior.

In the end, it’s the same cycle: leaders get paid, check their boxes, and move on — and employees pay the price.