SAP Stock Slides on Twin Pressures: Oracle’s Capex Shock and Security Patch Woes, Despite Strong Cloud Growth
11.06.2026 - 20:44:11 | boerse-global.de
SAP finds itself in a peculiar bind: the German software giant is reporting robust cloud bookings, yet its stock keeps sliding. The shares fell 4.2% to €141.86 on the latest bout of selling, bringing the year-to-date decline to 29% and leaving the market capitalisation at €185.2bn. From the July 2025 peak of €266, almost half the company’s value has evaporated. The disconnect between operational strength and investor sentiment is widening by the day.
The immediate trigger for the latest drop came from across the Atlantic. Oracle posted impressive quarterly results after the US market close on 10 June – record revenue and earnings above expectations – but the stock plunged in after-hours trading anyway. The culprit was a jaw-dropping capital expenditure forecast of up to $95bn for fiscal 2027, far exceeding Wall Street’s estimates. For SAP, which competes with Oracle in enterprise software and cloud services, that capex splurge signals rising sector costs and potential margin compression. The fear is that both companies will be spending heavily on infrastructure, squeezing profits for years. Adding fuel, UBS downgraded a basket of European IT stocks, while Goldman Sachs slashed its gross margin forecast for SAP, citing elevated hardware costs in the second half of 2026.
Compounding the sector headwinds, SAP’s monthly security patch day on 9 June delivered an unusually sharp risk profile. The company issued 15 new security notes, four of them critical. The most alarming vulnerability carries a CVSS score of 9.9 and resides in the SAML authentication mechanism, allowing attackers to intercept signed messages and inject manipulated XML documents. Another critical flaw, rated 9.8, affects the ABAP kernel and can be triggered by a specially crafted RFC request – no valid credentials required. The affected products include SAP NetWeaver AS ABAP, the ABAP Platform, Application Server Java, SAP Commerce Cloud, and SAP Data Hub. While such patches are routine, the severity and breadth of this batch have refocused attention on the operational risks embedded in SAP’s sprawling installed base.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying SAP?
Yet beneath the surface of the sell-off lies a genuine operational paradox. In the first quarter of 2026, SAP’s cloud order backlog jumped 20% to €21.9bn, and total revenue rose 6%. The company expects full-year cloud revenue of as much as €26.2bn. At the Sapphire conference earlier this year, management unveiled its vision of the “autonomous enterprise”, where humans and artificial intelligence collaborate to run core business processes across finance, supply chains and human resources. More than 200 AI agents are slated for deployment in the coming months. A recent survey found that 39% of SAP customers already cite AI as the primary reason to move to the cloud.
Execution, however, is proving harder than the pitch. SAP’s customers are famously conservative; handing sensitive data to an AI system does not happen overnight. Analysts are growing more cautious about the speed of monetisation. The company’s historic data advantage – decades of deeply embedded customer information – should be a powerful lever, but the market wants to see that advantage translate into hard revenue quickly. So far, the evidence is thin. Meanwhile, investment in data centres and AI capabilities is running far ahead of new subscription income, putting further pressure on near-term margins.
The interest-rate backdrop only darkens the picture. Goldman Sachs has revised its US Federal Reserve forecast and now expects no rate cuts in 2026, with action possibly delayed until 2027. Higher discount rates hit growth stocks disproportionately, and SAP’s forward valuation, while well below its peak, still reflects expectations of future earnings that must now be discounted more heavily.
Bond investors, at least, remain sanguine. SAP placed a record bond in late May, drawing top ratings from S&P and Moody’s. But equity holders are playing a longer game. The transition from perpetual licence fees to cloud subscriptions – and from passive IT systems to active AI networks – eats into margins upfront. The next hard test comes on 23 July, when SAP reports second-quarter results. The market will be watching not just revenue, but the cloud current backlog and explicit guidance on cost control around AI. As Oracle just demonstrated, promising bold investments without a clear margin story is a recipe for a savage rebuke.
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