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SAP is making its largest acquisition yet as it battles rivals including Salesforce.com in selling software to clients that want to better understand their customers.
The $8bn purchase of Qualtrics International, whose software gathers and analyses data, is meant to strengthen SAP’s offering in the customer relations management sector. That’s a field Europe’s biggest software company wants to gain a stronger foothold in because it’s growing faster than its core enterprise software business.
Based in Utah, Qualtrics collects data on customers, brand, employees and products - such as emails, social media posts and in-app data - to give companies insights into how their customers behave or feel about them. The startup had been planning on listing on Nasdaq in a deal with a potential valuation of up to $4.5bn.
SAP fell as much as 4.7% in early Frankfurt trading on Monday, as analysts questioned the price of the deal. It’s an expensive plan to buy growth, said Neil Campling, an analyst at Mirabaud. The offer price, about 20 times Qualtrics’s sales this year, is an "extremely high multiple whichever way you look at it," he said in emailed comments.
Largest deal to date
SAP, led by Chief Executive Officer Bill McDermott, has secured financing of €7bn to pay for the purchase, the company said late on Sunday. This is the German company’s largest deal to date, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, topping its 2014 acquisition of Concur Technologies for $7.2bn.
"Tuck-ins are tuck-ins but transformative deals are transformative deals," McDermott said on a conference call. "You’d have to do a whole lot of tuck-ins and spend a whole lot of years tucking-things-in to do what we did here."
SurveyMonkey, a close rival, surged as much as 67% in its trading debut in September after the online-polling startup raised $180m in its bigger-than-targeted US initial public offering. However, the deal was initially priced below its $2bn valuation in a 2014 private funding round.
Qualtrics sees sales exceeding $400m this year and forecasts a forward growth rate of greater than 40%. Their planned IPO was more than 13 times oversubscribed, CEO Ryan Smith said. The company was valued at $2.5bn in a 2017 private funding round and its customers include Microsoft, JetBlue Airways and General Electric.
Customers don’t need extensive coding expertise to use Qualtrics’s tools, and can use features such as automated sentiment analysis of open text responses. Saks Fifth Avenue uses Qualtrics to create questionnaires for feedback on its fashion brands; Whole Foods Market uses it to gather and analyse the qualifications of its employees.
Growing market
"SAP is launching a greater push into CRM, which is growing at 20% and is becoming one of the biggest markets in the software space," said Holger Schmidt, an analyst at Bankhaus Metzler. "It’s about collecting more data - about products, customers and supply chains."
SAP anticipates that the transaction will close in the first half of 2019, and Qualtrics will operate as an entity within SAP’s cloud business group. Ryan Smith, Qualtrics’s CEO, will continue to lead the company, which will maintain dual headquarters in Provo, Utah, and Seattle.
Qualtrics resisted taking venture money for over a decade before finally agreeing to deals with Accel and Sequoia Capital. Ryan, who reportedly once turned down a $500m offer for his company, his family members and other major shareholders are now poised to get about $7bn for their shares.
"We want to be working with SAP and that’s what we’re most excited about," Smith said on the call.
Qualtrics was advised on the transaction by Qatalyst Partners and Goodwin Procter. JPMorgan Chase & Co acted as a financial adviser and Jones Day acted as legal adviser to SAP.
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