SAP Enters October With a Raised Price Target, a Patent Setback and a Cloud Growth Question
Published on 10/18/2026 at 03:50 | Editorial boerse-global.de
Two brokerage houses have drawn opposite conclusions about SAP's prospects, and the disagreement lands just as the software maker prepares to report third-quarter 2026 results on October 21 at roughly 22:05 CEST.
TD Cowen's Derrick Wood lifted his price target to $250 from $205 on Wednesday while keeping a Buy rating. JPMorgan's Toby Ogg, writing a day earlier, left SAP at Neutral, noting that investors are asking whether the outlook for the remainder of 2026 and for 2027 justifies putting money to work. The gap between the two positions is less about the next set of numbers than about how much confidence the longer-term trajectory can support.
The backlog number everyone will be watching
Central to that debate is the Current Cloud Backlog. Currency-adjusted growth in the second quarter of 2026 came in at 26%, and press reports on Thursday suggested the market is bracing for a possible slowdown. A deceleration and a disappointment are not the same thing, though — if investors have already priced in softer momentum, the bar for the actual print is lower than it looks.
That makes the October 21 release the next hard data point against which both calls can be measured. Whether SAP keeps expanding is only half the question; how that expansion stacks up against expectations is the other.
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A Munich injunction adds a second uncertainty
Growth is not the only item on the risk ledger. A German court has ruled against SAP in its patent dispute with Celonis, requiring the company to stop using one affected function of SAP Signavio Process Intelligence in Germany, provide information and pay appropriate damages. SAP has said it will appeal, and according to the company the ruling touches a single feature while SAP Signavio remains available to customers.
So investors are weighing two separate unknowns at once — the durability of cloud growth and the fallout from the litigation. A higher price target resolves neither.
What British boardrooms say about AI spending
On the demand side, SAP published an Oxford Economics survey on Wednesday that offers a read on how potential customers are thinking. British companies spend an average of ÂŁ20.6 million on AI, and they expect the return on those investments to climb from 22% this year to 39% by 2028.
The distinction between expectation and outcome matters here. Firms anticipate greater economic benefit from their AI outlays; whether those expectations materialize is unproven, and the spending figures cannot be attributed directly to SAP. The study is best read as a demand indicator — evidence that British enterprises are willing to commit serious money to AI — rather than as proof of additional SAP revenue.
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Concrete deployments, unproven revenue
SAP's own initiatives map onto that theme. On October 12 it opened S.Public in Berlin, an experience center aimed at the public sector and focused on digital sovereignty, sovereign cloud and AI applications in administrative processes. The company also announced on October 6 the acquisition of Belgium's TechWolf, whose AI-driven work-intelligence platform is designed to give companies an evidence-based view of workflows. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to customary conditions including regulatory approvals; SAP did not disclose financial terms, so no reliable read on the purchase price is possible yet.
Both moves show where SAP is placing its bets. Neither, on its own, demonstrates new orders or revenue — a distinction worth keeping in mind as the quarterly figures approach. Those numbers will carry more weight than the return expectations in a corporate survey or the presentation of new applications.
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