FRANKFURT, Jan 31, 2026, 21:28 CET — Market closed.
SAP shares in Frankfurt ended Friday up 3.6% at 170.56 euros, after falling 16.1% a day earlier. With markets shut for the weekend, the SAP share price heads into Monday, Feb. 2, still hostage to questions about cloud momentum.
Thursday’s slide followed SAP’s warning that current cloud backlog growth would “slightly decelerate” in 2026, despite a forecast for cloud revenue growth of 23% to 25%. Current cloud backlog tracks cloud sales expected to be booked as revenue over the next 12 months; the company’s finance chief said the slowdown was bigger than anticipated as customers shift to larger projects and sovereign-cloud work that can take longer to land and ramp. Balajee Tirupati at Citi said SAP “needed an all-round acceleration” and he saw shares underperforming. Reuters
SAP said bookings lifted total cloud backlog to a record 77 billion euros in the fourth quarter and it expects 2026 cloud revenue of 25.8 billion euros to 26.2 billion euros at constant currencies. It forecast non-IFRS operating profit of 11.9 billion euros to 12.3 billion euros and about 10 billion euros in free cash flow, and said a new share buyback of up to 10 billion euros is scheduled to start in February. Chief executive Christian Klein called it “a strong cloud quarter”, while finance chief Dominik Asam said SAP closed 2025 “on a high note”. PR Newswire
Friday’s rebound did not settle much. The next session will test whether investors treat the guidance reset as a one-off dent, or the start of a slower stretch where misses — even small ones — get punished.
The debate keeps circling back to one line. Current cloud backlog is meant to give a near-term read on how fast signed cloud deals are feeding next year’s revenue; it can also be noisy when the mix shifts toward bigger, longer-dated contracts.
Berenberg cut its price target on SAP to 250 euros from 280 euros while keeping a buy rating, saying the “moderate shortfall” did not justify the size of the drop. Analyst Nay Soe Naing wrote that the quarter had not changed the longer-term investment story. MarketScreener
But there is a clear downside path if it goes wrong. If big transformation projects keep pushing revenue further out, and deal cycles stay long in sovereign cloud — essentially cloud setups that keep data under local control — backlog growth can stay soft longer than the market is willing to tolerate.
Competitive yardsticks are not going away. Investors will keep stacking SAP’s cloud trends against enterprise software peers such as Dassault Systèmes and ServiceNow, where backlog, renewals and usage data have become the quickest scorecards.
For the week ahead, traders will watch for more target changes, fresh reads on deal timing, and early signs of how quickly buybacks show up in trading. Volatility may stay high; the stock has already shown it can swing hard on a single metric.
Next on the calendar, SAP plans to publish its Integrated Report 2025 on Feb. 26, with first-quarter results due on April 23.
