Shares of the European enterprise software maker SAP SE registered solid gains in late trading today after the company delivered earnings results that beat expectations.

The company’s American depository receipts gained more than 6% in the after-hours trading session, reversing a decline of just over 6% that occurred in regular trading, prior to the results coming out. SAP was one of a number of software stocks that took a beating earlier today, following unspectacular earnings results from major players IBM Corp. and ServiceNow Inc.

The German enterprise resource planning software giant reported first-quarter earnings of €1.72 ($2.01) per share on revenue of €9.55 billion, up 6% from the same period one year earlier. Those numbers do not adhere to International Financing Reporting Standards, however, so they exclude one-off items such as amortization and restructuring costs. The results were solid, though, with analysts expecting the company to report earnings of just €1.65 per share on similar revenue.

SAP’s gains during the quarter were driven by its cloud business, which has benefitted from the artificial intelligence boom that some analysts fear will ultimately kill all software companies. The unit generated sales of €5.96 billion, up 19% from a year earlier and above the Street’s forecast of €5.89 billion. Meanwhile, the company ended the quarter with a backlog of €21.9 billion worth of cloud orders, up 20% from one year earlier.

Chief Executive Christian Klein (pictured) hailed the company’s strong start to the year. “This performance is supported by our momentum in Business AI as we are already delivering real outcomes for customers today,” he insisted. “We are growing faster than the market and are gaining share as customers expand across our Suite and with our AI solutions.”

The company reiterated its annual forecast of between €25.8 billion and €26.2 billion in cloud revenue, which is better than the analyst consensus estimate of €25.62 billion. That said, SAP warned that the guidance “assumes a near-term de-escalation of the conflict in the Middle East and the imminent consolidation of Reltio.”

SAP revealed plans last month to acquire Reltio Inc. a provider of data integration and management technologies, saying it expects the transaction to close swiftly, by the second or third quarter. SAP is buying Reltio to power its growing fleet of autonomous AI agents, and will use the company’s technology to build the integrations its intelligent bots need to pull in data from third-party sources.

The company’s total revenue forecast for fiscal 2026 predicts similar growth levels to last year, but officials said today they believe this will begin to accelerate in fiscal 2027. Despite today’s after-hours gains, SAP’s stock is still reeling from the damage done to the software industry by the rise of AI agents, down more than 33% in the year-to-date.

Photo: SAP