SAP SE Annual Shareholders Meeting

May 15, 2019 AM UTC 查看原文
SAP.DE - SAP SE
SAP SE Annual Shareholders Meeting
May 15, 2019 / 08:00AM GMT 

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Corporate Participants
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   *  Hasso C. Plattner
      SAP SE - Co-Founder & Chairman of the Supervisory Board
   *  Juergen Müller
      SAP SE - CTO & Member of Executive Board
   *  Stefan Gruber
      SAP SE - Head of IR
   *  William R. McDermott
      SAP SE - CEO & Member of Executive Board

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Conference Call Participants
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   *  Gunnar Wiedenfels
      Discovery, Inc. - CFO

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Presentation
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 Hasso C. Plattner,  SAP SE - Co-Founder & Chairman of the Supervisory Board   [1]
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 Well, 1 year over again. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'm pleased to declare the Annual General Meeting of Shareholders of SAP SE. As required by the company's articles, as Chairperson of the Supervisory Board, I'll be presiding over today's meeting. On the behalf of the Supervisory Board and the Executive Board, I'd like to bid you our shareholders and shareholders proxies a warm welcome.

 We're delighted that once again so many of you are able to attend. I also welcome our guests and especially the members of the press, whom we'd like to thank for their objective and informed reporting on our company over the past 12 months.

 Ladies and gentlemen, as usual, I first need to announce the formalities of this Annual General Meeting of Shareholders. All members of the Executive Board are here today. All members of the Supervisory Board are likewise here today, with the exception of Mr. Ben Liautaud, who sends his apologies.

 I'd also like to welcome Dr. Stefan [Firamitz,] Notary Public, who'll be taking the minutes. Welcome.

 Today's meeting was called with due notice in accordance with legal requirements and the provisions of the Articles of Incorporation. Notice of the Meeting was published in the Bundesanzeiger on April 5, 2019. A copy of the notice is available for inspection at the speakers' table. It would be annexed to the minutes. All notices required for the convening the Annual General Meeting of Shareholders were properly issued. No motions or candidacies were submitted by shareholders of the company.

 The official meeting only includes this main hall of the SAP Arena, plus all other rooms and areas in the SAP Arena that are accessible to shareholders after passing through security at the entrance. These include the training hall, opposite the entrance area, where you'll find the catering services as well as the spectator stairs on the first floor where there are more catering services.

 The meeting will be broadcast throughout the official meetings on via loud speakers. There's also big screen in the training hall on which you can follow the meeting.

 The attendance register is computerized and constantly updated. There's a terminal at the speakers' table, at which you can inspect the register at any time during the meeting.

 If you wish to leave the shareholders' meeting early, you can appoint the employees of the company present for that purpose as your proxy. To do so, please use the proxy and the instruction card in the back section of your ballot card book.

 You're allowed to instruct the proxies, provided by the company exclusively, with respect to voting on the management proposals published in the invitation. You can, however, entrust your vote to another participant. To do so, detach the attendance card and proxy form from your ballot card book. On your way out, hand your completed proxy form to the staff at the door and keep your attendance card. Give your proxy your ballot card book. If you wish to leave the meeting temporarily or early and do not wish to appoint a proxy to vote on your behalf, please hand in your attendance card and your voting cards at the exit.

 As in the previous year, online participation is also possible. Shareholders participating online can follow a live webcast of the entire meeting, cast their votes in real-time and inspect the attendance register. Shareholders participating via the Internet proxy appointment and instruction system have until the beginning of voting on management's announced proposals to send or amend their appointments and instructions regarding these proposals.

 All shareholders and proxies who wish to speak or ask questions are kindly asked to report to the speakers' table as soon as possible. Please complete a speakers' request form. Please clearly and legibly write your name and the number of your ballot card book on the request form. I must insist that every shareholder or proxy wishing to speak without exception first hand in the request form at the speakers' table and then wait until called to speak. When it's your turn to speak, please go to one of the microphones in the main hall.

 The entire Annual General Meeting of Shareholders is being publicly broadcast on the Internet. However, only what I'm saying now and the speech of CEO, Bill McDermott, will be recorded and posted on the Internet after the meeting.

 As in the previous year, we are allowing some television companies to broadcast highlights from Mr. McDermott's speech. However, we are allowing the TV companies to show sections of his speech only. The entire meeting is also being documented in sound and video for the record. If a shareholder or proxy objects to the recording of his or her speech, we will not record that speech. I would like to remind all of you here and those shareholders participating online that you're not permitted to make any sound or video recordings of the meeting yourselves.

 Ladies and gentlemen, and now to the agenda. Let's take first take item 1.

 I can report that the following documents were available at the website www.sap.com/investors from the time the general meeting was called. The 2018 SAP SE financial statements, the consolidated financial statements, the combined management report for the SAP Group and SAP SE, including the compensation report and the Executive Board's explanatory notes relating to the information provided pursuant to the German Commercial Code sections 289a(1) and 315a(1).

 The Supervisory Board report and the Executive Board's proposed resolution on the appropriation of retained earnings. These documents are also available for inspection in the meeting room.

 You'll find the documents at the speakers' table in the main hall and at the booth by the entrance to the side hall. The auditor KPMG AG Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft examined the SAP SE financial statements, the consolidated financial statements and the combined SAP SE and SAP Group management report for fiscal 2018 and issued an unqualified audit opinion.

 The Supervisory Board reviewed and approved the aforementioned document on the 20th of February, 2019. The SAP SE financial statements for 2018 were thus formally adopted. The Supervisory Board compiled a written report, which is published on pages 18 to 25 of the Integrated Report.

 This report describes the focus of our work in 2018 in detail and the way in which we discharged our function of advising and supervising the SAP Executive Board. Our work is founded on a close and trusting partnership between the Supervisory Board and the Executive Board and the efficient distribution of tasks between the Supervisory Board and its committees and not least, the use of our own software such as SAP Digital Boardroom, which visualizes all financial personnel and process-related information across all company transactions for us in real-time, whenever we need it.

 Let me go into more detail about some of the focus areas of work. Last year, the Supervisory Board devoted considerable time and several meetings to discussing personnel changes on the Executive Board and the associated restructuring of the Executive Board. We also discussed at length the company's Intelligent Enterprise strategy, aimed at helping SAP customers evolve into intelligent enterprises, especially in connection with the decision to acquire Callidus.

 Our plenary session on the 25th of October focused on a further key step in this strategy, namely the acquisition of Qualtrics, a U.S.-based market leader in experience management. The Supervisory Board was closely involved in these strategic decisions, and together with the Executive Board, I'm repeating what it says in German. And together with the Executive Board believes these measures will ideally position and strengthen our company for the future. In German, the sentence is a bit awkward, but never mind.

 Ladies and gentlemen, last year I promised to continue to maintain an open corporate governance style with our shareholders on subjects that are the responsibility of the Supervisory Board. The aim of these discussions is to ensure that feedback from our shareholders, thus from all of you, is continuously brought to bear in the Supervisory Board's work. And while I obviously cannot conduct this dialogue with each and every shareholder, it's important to me that we make the subject matter and outcomes of our discussion with institutional investors transparent for all shareholders. As last year, you can read my open letter to investors in the Investor Relations section on the SAP website. It summarizes on the main themes of these discussions.

 I'd now like to turn to changes in the membership of the Executive Board. The Supervisory Board appointed Juergen Müller to the Executive Board, with effect from January 1, 2019. Since then Juergen has been responsible for the Technology and Innovation Board. Anyway, I'd like to welcome Juergen to the meeting and ask him briefly to introduce himself to our shareholders.

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 Juergen Müller,  SAP SE - CTO & Member of Executive Board   [2]
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 Thank you very much, Hasso. Dear shareholders and shareholder representatives, ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to be able to introduce myself to you. I'd like to start on a personal note because this is certainly a one off. I'm by far the eldest of a total of six siblings. And I was born and grew up in a small city called [Kirchrode], which is close to Hanover. I don't know what there is to see but the trade fair, which I attended almost every year or other things, but I became very much interested in technology early on. And at the age of 12, I already had my first computer. And I quickly learned that you cannot only use it for playing games but also develop software.

 My second passion was soccer. Not only playing soccer, by the age of 14, I also was one of the youngest referees in the Lower Saxony. Values such as openness, transparency, fairness and honesty have always been very important to me. Then at some time my coach told me that most probably if I really tried very hard, I could make it to the third German league. Well, then I told myself, maybe in technology you can better make it to the Champions League. So at the age of 17, together with a couple of friends, I set up my first company for website development, which we kept up for a long time. And I also studied Business Information Technology in Göttingen, and I also spent six month in Shanghai, in China, in during that time.

 And I also kept working all the time, either at the University, also with consulting firms, also SAP. And for me it was always important to use technology in order to help the company and people. Then while my entry at SAP came in two stages, so to speak. The first step was in 2007 when I started working on my PhD at the Hasso Plattner Institute. And then in 2013, I officially took up employment at SAP.

 At that time Vishal Sikka, the then CTO of SAP, asked me to take over the Innovation Center in Potsdam. And then he and later on Bernd Leukert also placed their trust in me in setting up an Innovation Center Network. In 2016, then, Bill McDermott asked me to become the first Chief Innovation Officer of SAP. And in that capacity, I focused very much on innovation technologies such as machine learning. In 2018, then, I also took over the development area for LAN Auto, that's our technology area where machine learning, blockchain and so on are further developed. And I also took over the analytics development unit.

 And now, since earlier of this year, I have been a member of the Executive Board of SAP where I actually have got 2 tasks. In the role of the Technology and Innovation Officer I'm in charge of the technology platform, so SAP HANA data management is very important, if you make available for our in-house applications and also for our customers. In addition, this responsibility includes analytics, LAN Auto and our SAP platform.

 And as the CTO, I'm in charge of cross-company topics such as the Intelligent Suite program. Here I team up very closely with Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein.

 And of course, it is very important for us to further drive our core obligations and technologies. We want to become measurable. So the Boston Consulting Group, BCG, recently published their list of the most innovative technology companies in 2019 and from 2018 to 2019, moved up -- we moved up from 42nd to 28th. And that's exactly what we want to see for SAP, which means we're clearly ahead of Salesforce, Workday and Oracle. And that is exactly what we want to achieve. What I also consider very important is to make sure that everybody is proud of our technologies, because we can truly take pride in what we have achieved and what we achieve every day.

 Now with that, I would like to thank all of you. I hope I've been able to give you some insights who I am personally, how my career evolved and why -- what I'm now dealing with at SAP on your behalf. SAP is an exciting and fascinating company with loyal customers and excellent employees. Every day, I'm glad to be part of their team, contributing to making SAP better every day.

 I'd like to thank you, Hasso, for the trust you've placed in me and also the entire Supervisory Board. Thanks all to you, Bill and the entire Executive Board. And finally I also would like to thank you, the shareholders and shareholder representatives, and I hope you will enjoy now the rest of this is AGM. Thank you very much.

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 Hasso C. Plattner,  SAP SE - Co-Founder & Chairman of the Supervisory Board   [3]
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 Well, on top of that, there were the changes in the Executive Board. In February this year, Ben Leukert and the Supervisory Board agreed on his immediate leaving of the Executive Board and Rob Enslin in April left SAP at his own request to pursue new business challenges outside the company.

 Ben and Rob had each spent more than two decades at SAP and had been members of the Executive Board since 2014. Highly regarded among SAP employees, partners and customers and like, both played a vital role in the success of the company with an extensive experience and expert know-how. We thank both of them for their long-standing commitment to SAP.

 I spoke too much English over the past three months, my German gets rusty. Ladies and gentlemen, there will also be some changes in the membership of the Supervisory Board. As you've already read in the invitation to today's meeting, the memberships of all shareholder representatives on the Supervisory Board is expiring, which means new elections have to be held. Mr. Erhard Schipporeit, who had been a Supervisory Board member since 2005, is not standing for reelection. I'd like to thank Mr. Schipporeit on behalf of the entire Supervisory Board for his many years of service on the Supervisory Board, above all, for his work as Chairperson of the Finance and Investment Committee and the Audit Committee. We'll miss his experience and expertise greatly.

 You already know the other candidates standing for election to the Supervisory Board, with the exception perhaps of Mr. Gunnar Wiedenfels who, if elected, will be proposed as Chairperson of the Audit Committee. As he's standing for election by the shareholders for the first time today, I'd like to ask Mr. Wiedenfels to briefly introduce himself.

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 Gunnar Wiedenfels,  Discovery, Inc. - CFO   [4]
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 Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Gunnar Wiedenfels. I'm 41 years old. I'm currently the CFO of Discovery Inc., which is an American global media company listed at the NASDAQ, generating revenues of about USD 11 billion and an EBITDA of about USD 4.5 billion. We operate TV stations all over the world, Discovery Channel, Eurosports, DMAX and TLC. Well, these are those names, which you might have heard here in Germany. It is a great honor to be here today. SAP is clearly one of the key global success stories. And personally, I'm pleased to be here today because SAP has an important effect in all of my professional life. It started out at University, then in my first job and also as a use of different SAP applications. And now I'm here today, so I'm very pleased.

 Now by way of introduction, going way back, I went to university not far from here at University of Mannheim studying Business Information Technology. This is when I first got exposed to SAP. In 1999, 2000 I took up my first job where I developed HTML pages for the mySAP product in Walldorf.

 After graduation, I took up my first full employment in management consulting. I took the opportunity to work in different industries, functions and geographies with McKinsey, which I did for about 5 years before then getting my PhD in Business Administration at Aachen University. I then soon joined ProSiebenSat. 1, started out in strategy, then did the right step into the finance space where I held several roles before in 2015. In April 2015, I became the CFO.

 And after 8 years with ProSiebenSat. 1, almost exactly 2 years ago, my wife, my 3 children and I, we moved over the U.S. We now live in a New York City area where I have been the CFO of Discovery for 2 years.

 So much on my background. So once again let me tell you I'm pleased to be here. Thanks for the trust you've placed in me.

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 Hasso C. Plattner,  SAP SE - Co-Founder & Chairman of the Supervisory Board   [5]
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 Ladies and gentlemen, as you can see from our proposals, I'm only standing for election for three more years. And these three years will be my last term in office. I'm often asked who'll replace me as Supervisory Board Chair. Rest assured that I have and am giving this metric great deal of thought. But please understand also that I'll not be giving out any information about this today. All relevant details will be disclosed at the appropriate time before the end of my term.

 Various changes among the employee representatives on the SAP SE Supervisory Board will also take effect for the end of this meeting. SAP employees have already elected their new representatives, who will take their seats after today's meeting. The following representatives have retired from the Supervisory Board: Mr. Martin Duffek, Mr. Andreas Hahn, Mr. Robert Schuschnig-Fowler and Dr. Sebastian Sick and Mr. Pierre Thiollet. I'd also like to thank them for their practical and constructive work throughout the years of membership.

 f

 Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to turn now to the matter of the Executive Board compensation. Your criticism of the structure of our Executive Board compensation and how it is reported in our compensation report prompted us to introduce a number of changes in 2018, which we presented for your approval at the 2018 Annual General Meeting of Shareholders.

 In the last AGM, extremely positive approval rate last year, no further changes were made to the compensation system. And as such, the Executive Board compensation is not on this year's meeting agenda. However, we do foresee having to make a number of key regulatory changes this year concerning Executive Board compensation in response to the new shareholders' rights directive and revised German Corporate Governance Code. However, neither of these new regulatory mechanisms have entered into force yet, which means we are currently unable to say exactly what changes we'll make.

 Our General and Compensation Committee, which is responsible for Executive Board compensation, is monitoring these developments very closely, in order to be able to react quickly to new requirements and will, of course, also take shareholder feedback into account when revising our compensation structure.

 Ladies and gentlemen, I'll now ask Bill McDermott to address you. Because Bill doesn't speak German, his speech will be interpreted simultaneously to German, so that everyone can follow. And Bill's answers will also be interpreted into German. Bill, please?

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 William R. McDermott,  SAP SE - CEO & Member of Executive Board   [6]
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 Thank you.

 (foreign language)

 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Mannheim.

 On behalf of 100,000

 (foreign language)

 Rightful place in this esteemed group. We thank him for his wisdom and enduring support. Thank you, Hasso Plattner. We also thank the entire Supervisory Board for its excellent insight and guidance. Thank you dear Supervisory Board colleagues. As Hasso explained, we continue to build our strong leadership team with the addition of Juergen Müller. Juergen, congratulations and welcome to the Executive Board.

 Ladies and gentlemen, looking at the big picture, SAP is a rarity in our industry. We have a strong core business, the fastest growing cloud at scale and impressive operating profit growth. To expand on this, dear shareholders, let's discuss where we are, where we need to go and how we will get there?

 We are now in the 47th-year, my 10th year as CEO. Time really flies, doesn't it? Wow. Over the past 10 years, we have invested over $70 billion in innovation for our customers. To manage the fast-growing big data challenge, we invented the in-memory revolution with SAP HANA, the fastest database in the world. Thank you, Hasso and team. Great job.

 Today, nearly 30,000 customers run on the SAP HANA platform. We redesigned our core ERP applications to also run on SAP HANA. Now, nearly 11,000 customers have purchased SAP S/4HANA to transform their companies. To enable innovation around the core, we acquired the best cloud solutions, including SuccessFactors, Ariba, Fieldglass, Concur, Hybris and CallidusCloud. We now have more cloud users running our software than any enterprise application software company in the world. We have over 200 million users. With Ariba, Fieldglass and Concur, we are actually changing how commerce is conducted between companies. If you think about a consumer company like Amazon, they have $300 billion running through the Amazon network. Today, $3 trillion in commerce is running through the SAP Business Network. Now that's a global. That enterprise. That's mass scale.

 So our innovation-led strategy has really delivered for SAP. We have more than doubled our total revenue and operating profit and more than tripled our market value since 2010. And we continued this track record last year. In 2018, we increased our financial guidance 3 times to account for the strong business momentum. In January, we were very happy to announce that SAP met or exceeded our raised guidance metrics for the full year.

 So let's discuss the specific results. And please note, the numbers are non-IFRS. Percentages are non-IFRS at constant currencies. Our total revenue was EUR 24.7 billion, up 11%. Cloud and software reached EUR 20.66 billion, up 10%. Cloud revenue hit EUR 5.03 billion, up 38%. New cloud bookings, which is defined as cloud business we have signed but not yet collected, was up 28%.

 With strong operational discipline, we saw a 10% profit growth for the year, with EUR 7.16 billion achieved in operating profit. As our Q1 results show, 2019 is off to an even better start. We are strong.

 The following percentages are non-IFRS as reported. Cloud revenue exceeded EUR 1.5 billion for the first time in a quarter. That's up 48%. Cloud and software revenue accelerated, growing at 16%. Total revenue grew at an impressive rate, 16% as well. And our combined new order entry on premise and Cloud is up 17%.

 SAP is growing faster than our competition in both the core and the cloud. Our cloud organic growth is several points faster than key competitors. SAP's fast-growing cloud business, together with solid growth in support revenue, continue to drive the share of more predictable revenue in the company, which is now at 72%.

 In Q1, we also drove margin expansion and increased operating income. Our overall operating margin grew by 50 basis points. This was driven by strong cloud gross margin. We improved at 400 basis points, sequentially. Our improved gross margins and efficiency measures resulted in operating profit that was up by 19%. Free cash flow also saw a double-digit increase year-on-year. Because of this strong start to the year, we raised our operating profit guidance for 2019. We could not be happier about these Q1 results. I hope you feel the same way. Thank you.

 Now let's look at SAP's share price development. Since February of 2010, the share price has more than tripled. In 2018, SAP's momentum was reflected in our stock price, which reached a record high in September. Even as global market turbulence impacted us in late 2018, we are already back to record highs again in 2019.

 Today, your SAP has the highest market capitalization on the decks by far. We can all be very proud that SAP is Germany's most valuable brand and Germany's most valuable company, congratulations.

 The strong share price development is a sign of approval from the investment community. We firmly believe you, our shareholders, should benefit greatly from our success. It is our policy to pay a dividend totaling 40% or more of IFRS profit after tax. On the back of a very successful year, the Executive Board and the Supervisory Board propose to raise the dividend for 2018 by 7% to EUR 1.50 per share. This represents a dividend -- thank you. I love when you are happy like this. This represents a dividend payout of EUR 1.79 billion and a payout ratio of 44% based on our 2018 IFRS profit.

 And incidentally, over the past 10 years, we have returned more than EUR 11 billion in dividends to the shareholders. Of course, you'll be asked to vote on this dividend payout and the other topics on the screen in today's meeting. Allow me, please, to give you a moment to review this list.

 Before we shift to the future, SAP's financial results only tell part of the story. Our success would not be possible without our loyal and engaged workforce. 93% of our employees told us they are proud to work for SAP. This is 8% higher than the industry average. Our employee engagement score remained at an impressively high level. It was 84% in 2018. Through our corporate responsibilities, these are social initiatives. SAP colleagues volunteered more than 1 million hours. These efforts positively impacted 4 million people in 2018 alone. And even as we grew the company over 10%, we beat our ambition to shrink our carbon footprint by nearly 5%. Bottom line, we are on track. Thank you.

 Thank you, and we are on track to keep our promise to be carbon neutral by 2025. At 26% and growing fast, we're making real progress toward our goal of 30% women in management by 2022. With our Autism at Work -- thank you. Thank you.

 With our Autism at Work program, SAP is leading the way in neurodiversity. We offer a wide range of learning programs to upscale colleagues for the future. And you know what? The best validation always comes from the people themselves. We are 1 of only 2 companies in the world that rank on Glassdoor's top employer list in all 5 countries it surveys. Wow.

 Here's a short video for you. It shows the appeal SAP has as the employer of choice.

 (presentation)

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 William R. McDermott,  SAP SE - CEO & Member of Executive Board   [7]
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 Dear shareholders, we will remain focused on delivering financial, social and environmental success. This is the signature of a true market-leading company.

 Now let's talk about where we need to go to secure SAP's very bright future. The short answer, SAP needs to go where our customers need us most. We now live in an experience economy. With the rise of the mobile device, all of us have more choices now than ever before. As a result, businesses are feeling immense pressure to personalize every experience they offer. It's quite simple. If businesses don't offer what we want, we look elsewhere.

 Businesses are also struggling to bridge the experience gap. This is the difference between what a consumer expects and what they actually receive. This experience gap has created a EUR 1.4 trillion problem, it's big. That's the amount businesses lose each year when their frustrated consumers leave them for a competitor. As you know, SAP proudly serves the best-run businesses. Now it's clear a business can no longer be best run, if it does not bridge the experience gap. This is precisely what we have engineered SAP's solution portfolio to do. Last year, we introduced our customers to the intelligent enterprise. We told them that every business process must be connected from the demand chain to the supply chain. We introduced C/4HANA to help customers manage their data, sales, marketing, commerce and service needs. We gave them our plan to integrate C/4HANA, S/4HANA and all SAP cloud solutions. At a time when others are only talking about artificial intelligence, SAP includes SAP LAN Auto in all our solutions. Let's see it directly from the valued customer about their intelligent enterprise journey.

 (presentation)

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 William R. McDermott,  SAP SE - CEO & Member of Executive Board   [8]
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 The video shows you that SAP is on the right track. As we reflected on where the world was going, we actually knew something was missing. We could tell you what was going on, we just couldn't always tell you why. SAP needed Qualtrics to complete our intelligent enterprise strategy. This company pioneered the category now known as experience management. Please enjoy a short video to help introduce you to Qualtrics.

 (presentation)

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 William R. McDermott,  SAP SE - CEO & Member of Executive Board   [9]
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 All right. SAP is the #1 source of O-Data; Qualtrics, the #1 source of X-Data. By combining them, we offer a powerful formula that no other company in the world can match, X + O. Shortly after the Qualtrics acquisition was final, I read a headline from an industry analyst. She said, "I have seen the future of enterprise software. It is SAP and Qualtrics." At SAPPHIRE now, just last week, we presented this complete story to 30,000 people live and more than 1 million participants virtually. The response was simply outstanding. We can now help all people inside companies connect intimately to all people outside companies. We give SAP users a digital board room, where X-Data and O-Data power a fully integrated intelligent enterprise. With C/4HANA and S/4HANA, a single view of a consumer will drive every business decision. With our cloud solutions, every finance, HR, marketing, sales or procurement leader will innovate new business practices, and they will be the best ones. With Qualtrics, our customers will get real-time feedback from their customers to enable change to happen, before it's too late. In this era of industry 4.0, SAP LAN Auto connects every asset to its digital twin, which helps the world run better and improves people's lives. A short video to demonstrate this.

 (presentation)

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 William R. McDermott,  SAP SE - CEO & Member of Executive Board   [10]
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 Dear shareholders, this is the future of best-run business, in all industries, for enterprises of all sizes.

 This is also the perfect transition to our final question, how do we get there? Everything starts with the customer. We are an outside-in company that believes in design thinking and innovation. We used Qualtrics to change our net promoter process, while the vast majority of SAP customers are satisfied. We fully acknowledge there is still much work to be done. To continuously listen, improve, we now have initiated major programs in the company, like customer first and build customers for life. We are also improving and empowering our relationship with user communities around the world. SAP's user groups recently helped us announce new pricing and licensing options for our customers. Overall, getting it right for our customers is a race without a finish line. It is our job to know more, care more and do more. So we protect the trust our customers place in SAP.

 And this leads me to our passion to be the best version of ourselves. We must also be the best-run SAP. Following our Investor Day earlier this year, we used Qualtrics to get feedback from the financial community. They said, we love SAP's growth. They also said, we want more proof that, that growth creates both customers and shareholder value. This is validated by the feedback we hear from you. So I want to personally thank you, dear shareholders, for continuing this dialogue.

 And now is the right time to initiate the next phase of value creation and innovation for all SAP stakeholders. SAP now has the assets we need to deliver the intelligent enterprise. Our priorities are clear. Integration, running a more efficient company and using our partners wisely for things SAP shouldn't be doing itself.

 One example is the restructuring announced earlier this year. SAP continues to evolve to be what our customers need us to be.

 Another example is the special executive board committee we formed to focus on operational excellence. The goal of this review is to identify, evaluate and execute on operational levers across all functions of SAP. We will also take a disciplined approach to capital allocation, including evaluating a multi-year share repurchase program. Because by running a more focused SAP, we will deliver significant margin expansion across both our core and cloud businesses. In April, we updated our midterm 2023 ambition to reflect this. We are now targeting on average 100 basis points of margin expansion each year through 2023. And with regard to our partners, SAP will leverage the mass scale of cloud infrastructure providers. So our customers can choose to have SAP-run solutions in SAP's cloud, or they can also choose to run applications with our partners in their cloud because we will always be a company that listens, understands and acts in the best interest of our customers, and our customers have told us with resounding enthusiasm, they appreciate the choice we are providing them. Thank you.

 And please keep in mind, these priorities are about pacing expenses at a rate less than our revenue growth. By doing so, SAP will win strategically and operationally. Now one final element of a best-run SAP is compliance. We've taken several steps to strengthen our culture of compliance at SAP. We have transparently communicated the results of investigations, when it is permittable to do so. But today, let me be clear. We have a zero tolerance policy for unethical conduct, period.

 And dear shareholders, our ambition is not to deliver you an SAP that succeeds for a few quarters or a few years. Our ambition is to deliver you an S&P that succeeds for generations to come. You should always expect us -- thank you. You should always expect us to follow this ambition with courage, class and integrity. Thank you.

 Today, I'll close where I began. SAP is a rarity in the industry. And we are boldly entering the next chapter of growth, innovation and value creation. This will be in service to all stakeholders, customers, partners and shareholders alike. Our employees stand strong with you.

 By 2023, SAP aspires to reach EUR 35 billion in total revenue, to more than triple our cloud revenue, to reach a cloud gross margin of 75% and to reach an 80% share of more predictable revenue. As you would expect, our aim is not only to meet these aspirations, but to exceed them. You okay with that?

 Like you, we all know this is a complicated world. At the World Economic Forum earlier this year, we used Qualtrics for a global experience survey. People are nervous about climate change, automation and access to opportunity. And SAP by itself does not have the power to address all of these issues. But when you add SAP, our 437,000 customers and more than 2 million partners globally, everything is possible. Optimism is the only free stimulus left in this world. And we are optimistic that SAP will help our customers seize the biggest challenges, as we know they're also the greatest opportunities. Here is one final example to demonstrate this.

 (presentation)

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 William R. McDermott,  SAP SE - CEO & Member of Executive Board   [11]
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 Ladies and gentlemen, your trust makes these stories possible. Trust is the ultimate human currency. SAP will never break it. We stand humbly on the shoulders of giants who founded this company 47 years ago. We carried Germany's flag with us to the 190 countries where SAP does business around the world. And I could tell you this, Germany is admired everywhere for its engineering heritage. And SAP will honor that heritage. I thank you on behalf of my colleagues for standing with us on this journey. We can't do any of this without you. We're inspired by the responsibility we have to those who choose our brand, to this and the next generation who represent the bold and bright future of a diverse and inclusive world, I say, we will win. Our road is long, it's bright, and it has no limits. Vielen dank.

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 Stefan Gruber,  SAP SE - Head of IR   [12]
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 Thanks, Bill. I now have got the attendance registered of the share count of the company to the amount of 1,000,228,000 -- oh, that was wrong, sorry EUR 1,228,504,232 coming in, the same number of par values shares. We have today at this AGM, 880,865,653 shares with the same number of voting rights represented today, which corresponds to 71.7% of the share capital. Apart from that 478,262 shares we have received written votes, which later on will be taken into account in the counting of the results for the votes on the proposals of the management on Items 2 to 6. That's 880,943,850 par value shares are present or represented by written votes, which corresponds to 71.71% of the share capital.

 And maybe that's going to change during the course of the AGM, ladies and gentlemen. I am now calling for speakers to Item 1 and all other agenda items, that is to say Items to 2 to 6 in the invitation to the meeting, of which copies are available in the meeting rooms.

 I hereby open the discussion section of the meeting, which I will take as a general debate on all agenda items together.

 [Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]




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