With EU Probe Settled and Cloud Consensus at 22%, SAP Awaits a Defining Earnings Release
Published on 07/18/2026 at 03:52 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
SAP’s stock teeters near its 52-week low as the software giant approaches a pivotal quarterly earnings report on July 23, caught between a resolved regulatory threat, a steep analyst downgrade, and broader sector headwinds stirred by IBM’s disappointing results.
The company will release second-quarter and first-half 2026 figures after the Frankfurt close (around 22:05 MESZ) on July 23, with a conference call scheduled for 23:00 MESZ. The market’s focus is squarely on cloud revenue growth, where the consensus estimates a 22% increase, and on the trajectory of the cloud order backlog. SAP entered its quiet period on June 22, meaning management has been silent on current business trends until the official release.
The analyst community, however, offers little unified guidance on what to expect. Bernstein reaffirmed its “Buy” rating on July 16 with a 276-euro target, a level far above the current share price. Morningstar’s Rob Hales assigned a fair value of 265 euros on July 17, but flagged risks from the Iran conflict and rising energy costs that could squeeze customers’ IT budgets. At the opposite end of the spectrum, UBS analyst Michael Briest slashed his price target from 205 euros to 164 euros on July 13 — a cut of more than 20% — while retaining a “Buy” rating. His rationale: the integration and monetization of new AI agents at SAP’s large enterprise clients is proving far slower and more complex than anticipated, threatening the company’s ambitions around “agentic AI.”
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying SAP?
The stock’s recent price action reflects the uncertainty. On Friday, SAP shares closed at 138.86 euros, down 1.56% on the day, leaving them with a year-to-date loss of 33.35%. That level is just 6.16% above the 52-week trough of 130.80 euros struck on June 25. One positive catalyst — the European Commission’s decision on July 9 to formally close its long-running antitrust probe into SAP’s maintenance and support policies without imposing a fine — failed to provide lasting relief. SAP must adhere to a set of commitments for ten years, including waiving reactivation fees for on-premise installations, but the settlement removes a billion-euro liability that had loomed over the stock.
The broader software sector has also weighed on sentiment. IBM shocked the market on July 14 with preliminary second-quarter revenue of just 17.2 billion dollars, well below expectations. The U.S. rival cited customers diverting IT budgets toward servers, storage, and AI hardware at the expense of software projects — a rotation that has dragged down SAP and its peers alike. UBS analysts noted that a brief bounce in SAP’s shares toward 140 euros was driven by a sector rotation they considered unsustainable.
On the operational front, SAP completed its acquisition of data-lakehouse platform Dremio on July 6, aiming to bolster its Autonomous Suite for agentic AI. The company also conducted its monthly patch day on July 14, fixing 16 security vulnerabilities, including three critical flaws in NetWeaver, Commerce Cloud, and AppRouter.
Despite the UBS target cut, all current analyst price targets remain above the stock’s trading level. The forward price-to-earnings multiple has compressed to roughly 22, less stretched than earlier in the year but still carrying a premium to the broad market — a premium that will need to be justified when SAP unveils its cloud growth numbers and provides clues on whether AI monetization is finally gathering pace.
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