Does SAP need crisis communication?

Even if the ugly word „crisis“ is brushed aside: Where is the communication from SAP CEO Christian Klein and CFO Dominik Asam? There is another way: CEO Roland Busch gave a convincing, inspiring and motivating speech at the presentation of Siemens' 2025 balance sheet figures. The Siemens CEO has a vision for his company and a clear idea of what AI should achieve. On the same day, the Siemens share price rose by seven percent.

It is not being claimed here that Roland Busch is doing everything right and that Management Board members Klein and Asam are wrong. A professional assessment should be made by other experts. My domains are communication, education and journalism. Compared to Siemens, SAP is not good at storytelling. SAP has neither ambitious and vivid goals nor a narrative classification of cloud and AI.

SAP presented surprisingly good balance sheet figures for 2025, but in the current age of social media, YouTube and communication, bare figures appear to be too little. Investors, the stock market, existing customers, analysts and the media demand more: the term crisis communication has been around longer than the newfangled word storytelling. However, both terms provide a good guide to overcoming current challenges.

What happened? One SAP parameter in the latest balance sheet figures was one percentage point below the expected value. Not nice, but in fact not a catastrophe, although many observers suspected that this mishap was responsible for the fall in the share price. I think there are better reasons for the crash: The SAP Executive Board did not paint a clear and global picture of the future of the ERP world market leader. What strategic and overarching goals does SAP want to achieve? How does SAP want to position itself in a future GenAI era? What should be SAP's future unique selling points in the ERP market?

The criticism of CEO Christian Klein has not been taken out of thin air: Siemens CEO Roland Busch wants to create a market capitalization of 400 billion euros and the ChatGPT of the industry, according to Manager Magazin („We are creating the industrial counterpart to ChatGPT“). The Manager Magazin interview was conducted by Franz Anko-Hubik and Michael Freitag. Roland Busch explained: „Nobody can avoid the topic of industrial AI. It is becoming more and more evident. And we are leading the way in industrial AI. [...] Creating an email with the help of AI is easy. Generating added value in a factory with it, on the other hand, is extremely difficult.“ Obviously, the CEO of Siemens has a unique selling point with AI. Roland Busch also has a stock market story on this.

An SAP balance sheet figure has missed the target figure by one percentage point and someone somewhere has discovered it - and within minutes it is circulating in editorial offices, on social media and in analyst chats. For a DAX-listed company like SAP, the first step should not be to clarify the situation, but to stage it. At this moment, crisis communication means above all: regaining control, securing interpretative sovereignty, buying time, which SAP CFO Dominik Asam naturally did not do! Crisis communication at SAP often becomes the art of controlled half-confessions because there is no positive and proactive ERP storytelling. (pmf)