SAP makes biggest deal since 2014, CEO backs US tax plan

Bloomberg

SAP SE Chief Executive Officer Bill McDermott has backed US President Donald Trump’s tax plan, and revealed a $2.4 billion deal for Callidus Software Inc., its biggest acquisition in more than three years.
SAP said it will pay $36 a share for Dublin, California-based Callidus, known as CallidusCloud, to give Europe’s biggest software company access to new sales analytic and customer engagement tools.
The Walldorf, Germany-based company also reported fourth quarter earnings, generating sales of $8.4 billion in the period, in line with analysts’ expectations, due to uptake of its flagship business software S/4 Hana.
New cloud bookings, a keenly watched metric for future sales growth, grew 31 percent at constant currencies.
Trump’s tax plan was “extremely well received” by CEOs at the World Economic Forum in Davos, McDermott said.
“There was not a single CEO I talked to that wasn’t feeling good about the economic momentum,” he said.
“2018 will be the year for investing in jobs, manufacturing, growth.”
McDermott has been expanding cloud-based services to challenge rivals such as Salesforce.com Inc. and Oracle Corp. and serve clients using the software to run sales, manufacturing and human resources functions. While McDermott said the deal doesn’t represent a return to a strategy of major acquisitions, it’s the biggest purchase since the $7.4 billion Concur deal that was announced in September 2014. Shares of Callidus closed at $32.7 as of end-of-trading.
Meanwhile, SAP’s flagship S/4 Hana software added 1,000 customers including Unilever NV and Puma SE in the fourth quarter to reach more than 7,900 users, a greater intake than in the previous three-month period.