SAP SE gained the most in eleven months after Europe’s biggest software company said the current backlog for its cloud services surged 19% and reaffirmed its annual forecast.
The current cloud backlog grew to €12.27 billion ($13 billion) last quarter, the Walldorf, Germany-based company said in a statement on Wednesday.
Shares rose as much as 7.1% on Thursday, the biggest intraday move since Nov. 10, and were up 4.5% to €126.56 at 3:45 p.m. in Frankfurt.
SAP has focused in recent quarters on a strategy to get customers to adopt a service to transition to a suite of new cloud-based products that are intended to work faster while costing less to distribute and maintain.
What Bloomberg Intelligence Says
SAP’s 25% cloud-backlog gain in constant currency surpassed consensus’ 23.5%, reversing the weak IT spending trends signaled by Oracle, Workday and Accenture. We attribute this strong performance to an increase in cloud migration of its legacy products.
— BI analysts Anurag Rana and Andrew Girard
Cloud revenue rose to €3.47 billion ($3.67 billion) in the third quarter, according to the statement. That compares with an average forecast of €3.57 billion by analysts in a Bloomberg survey.
Excluding some items, sales will be €8.65 billion to €8.95 billion this year, reiterating a prior projection, the company said. That compares with an average analyst estimate of €8.55 billion.
The latest results “demonstrate strong execution and the resilience of our business, including sustained cloud growth in spite of persisting macro headwinds,” Chief Financial Officer Dominik Asam said, according to the statement.
