SAP has made more than 70 acquisitions. How much have these contributed to shareholder value and share price?
Litmus was sold today - how much was recovered from the $2.5B Callidus purchase?
Can the company return to growth without aggressively culling the portfolio and modernizing / stabilizing acquisitions for the cloud?
Time will tell. How many will get to stick around? That’s another post.
What else can SAP sell?
@4sik+1ihdWWW5 - it's a good post.
Great transparency and insight. No AHC will discuss such realities. The $2.5B could have been better invested … sadly it was not.
It was a deal that even surprised the industry when SAP bought Callidus in 2018.
At the time of the acquisition Callidus was running a loss of $17 million at the end of Q3 FY2017 and we still bought and paid 2.4 B for them - means then for a company who was running at a significant loss, we paid multi billions to acquire them, a brilliant move ! And then there was the fact that Callidus and SAP had been long-term partners (SAP was also a customer) but Callidus was also partners with Salesforce, ADP and Workday, all of whom we compete against and so how was this going to work out? Our Leaders certainly didn't know.
And given all of these factors, the main question was, what is SAP going to do with Callidus?
Well let's say we have Board Members who are still in training and sometimes mistakes are the lesson of the day. The idea for this acquisition was what SAP had done for years with all of the other acquisitions, which is we were just really buying their customer base and looking to expand these customers into "multi-product" SAP customers. It didn't work out as planned.
The fact is that we are selling Callidus because it directly competes against Success Factors selling learning platforms . This competition is hurting overall corporate sales and declining profits. Why our leaders were blind to this simple fact is that we are on a rudderless boat.
Callidus acquisition was a joke! its executives were a joke! Thankfully, we got rid of them fairly quickly.
Our share price is down because we bought dead software, not growth companies that had a higher upside, now we are getting rid of products to get some of our money back.