Okay, perfect. Let me start this next session off. I'm Adam Wood. I'm looking after European tech research at Morgan Stanley. It's a great pleasure to have Dominik Asam, CFO of SAP. Dominik, thank you very much for joining us.
Thanks for having me, Adam.
It's a great pleasure, so look, let me start things off. I think the last, actually, probably a couple of years have seen a relatively tough spending environment for software companies, and yet, in your business, we've seen the cloud ERP suites even accelerate. I think investors are well aware of the 2027 and 2030 deadlines as, I would call them, as slight sticks to get people to move. You might disagree, but could we talk a little bit about what are the carrots? What are customers getting excited about and seeing as the positive opportunities for moving to S/4?
Yeah. I mean, firstly, I want to say that it's not that we go completely unscathed with the macro, because you've seen in our transaction businesses that we did see a dampening effect of the macro on businesses like Fieldglass, which are temporary workers, Concur travel expenses, or Ariba, where it's about procurement volumes. We do actually indeed enjoy that secular growth boost from converting our huge installed base very gradually into cloud customers. And whenever we do that, we have an opportunity to expand the revenue base quite massively.
The factor we always mention in the context is somewhere between two and three, to give you a ballpark number. And that is really firing on all cylinders, because, as you mentioned, some legacy systems like ECC have an out-of-maintenance deadline, mainstream maintenance end of 2027, extended maintenance 2030. But that's not all of it.
There's also that kind of scrambling for productivity. People are burdened by increasing personnel expenses with what we see now happening in the U.S. Maybe inflation will be there for a little bit longer. And that has an effect on productivity of the employees in terms of cost per job done. So everything that's more related to make companies more competitive, productive is right now in high demand. And maybe the focus is gravitating a little bit away from other areas. Also, we have a very strong upsell and cross-sell opportunity, which we can see in our renewal rates and net renewal rates, which are really supporting us. And the integration we have invested in very heavily over the last two or three years is now starting to pay off.
That customers realize the synergy if they can put stuff on one platform, and they don't have to waste a lot of money stitching them together with expensive resources from system integrators, so all these things come basically together, plus, of course, us entering something what used to be kind of a new market for us, which is the mid-market with the multi-tenant public cloud GROW with SAP, which is, of course, the ultimate destination for many customers, but for the smaller customers, it's easier to go there right away in one step, and all these things are coming together and give us a certain robustness, resilience in Cloud ERP Suite.
Maybe just on that theme of visibility, could you talk a little bit about how companies contract with you when they sign these S/4 contracts and what visibility that gives you into 2025, 2026, 2027?
Basically, when we sign a RISE contract, which, by the way, might not be purely RISE, there's also some parts of the business that might go GROW. There are some examples we can mention here where that's the case. When we do that, it's for the large enterprises, which are the traditional incumbent customer-based multi-year journeys. So we talk about maybe five-year journeys. You can also see it a little bit in the backlog we have. If you look at the CCB versus TCV, you see the kind of ratio is that order of magnitude. On the lines of business outside that S/4 journey, it's shorter, tends to be shorter, because customers have more choice.
One reason why people want to have a long contract duration is also that not only does it take them time to convert one instance after the other to a cloud environment, but they also want to have predictability of cost. And they think if you have a long contract, the kind of pricing is locked in for a long time, depending on what CPI clauses we have there. So it is actually for the lion's share of the large customers, which are also doing the heavy lifting on the revenue. It tends to be a longer-term undertaking. And this gives us this beautiful granular portfolio. So it's diversified in terms of when what customer is renting, diversified by geography, diversified by industries.
This is why that number is kind of remarkably stable, that Cloud ERP Suite number, because there's such a tremendously diversified portfolio, which is gradually stacking up to more and more revenues.
Yeah, you see the visibility from customers, you know, year two, year three, how they're going to step up on this.
Yes, yes. We have the ramp plan with the customer, how to roll out the system.
It's very helpful. And could you just talk a little bit about, we mentioned RISE, how much more attractive it is for you to sell a RISE contract versus a customer negotiating separately and choosing infrastructure, maybe the run of the environment?
I mean, with every customer, it's, of course, the discussion. If you put yourselves in the shoes of a customer, you would basically deny all the upside from AI and use cases we deliver and all the innovation we're going to bring to them. And they would say, look, I don't care about this funky stuff going forward. What I care about is total cost of ownership. And I have my software license from you, which, by the way, you sold way too cheap to us. So it's a tough comp. My biggest competition is software we sold too cheaply previously. And then we have an infrastructure contract, and then we have the managed services on top. Now, we have some unfair advantages. I mean, first of all, the economies of scale are huge.
We are much bigger than any of our customers in terms of how much hyperscaler capacity we procure. There might be some exception. I don't know whether the U.S. Government might be at a similar scale or so, but any normal industry company is a fraction of our demand. We have three of them we use, but we have all these customers on the planet, even the largest customers. We have a small fraction of our portfolio. Then the managed services, we can do so many things in one go, so to speak, and ensure all the compliance requirements, security requirements, all of that for many customers at the same time, where if you outsource that for your company only to an Infosys or so, well, it's no economies of scale, basically.
So if you fold these topics together, and also our commercial motivation that we say we are willing to put up with a slightly lower gross margin on cloud than on-prem, we can actually, despite the fact that the customer might be TCO neutral, and obviously, there's no reason for us to go beyond TCO neutral, because we know there's tons of icing on the cake for the customer once they are on the modern platform. So we try to do the contrary. We try to say, look, TCO is the wrong comparison. We want to have actually more than that, because you get value from us on top. We can convert the revenues at two-three X, because then also there's an incentive. Also, in the initial motion, sometimes we can fold in other products like BTP and so forth.
So if you throw it all together, this is what gives us the lift. And there are very few customers who are willing to do deals with us when there is no good business case for them to.
Right. That makes sense. I think probably the question I get asked most from investors is, where are we in this cycle? We know that you've got a big install base on support. They're moving to the cloud, going to S/4. Where are we on this journey? When does it peak? I think you've talked about this in terms of that support base and how that converts. Could you help us with that journey?
I mean, if you talk about conversion, you have to start from somewhere, which is basically on-prem. And on-prem, you pay maintenance, which, by the way, is a little bit of a misnomer. Maintenance sounds like you are basically trying to reestablish the original status quo when you sold the software. No, it's a continuous development. And when we develop the software, it's actually changing quite dramatically over time. So a large portion of the code line over time is changed. So I prefer to call it unofficially like continuous development of the product. And then we look at where do these revenues come from, and who are the customers who are already paying both maintenance and subscription in the cloud? That's easy to figure out in our ERP system.
And we see that that's actually kind of very roughly a quarter of the revenue base in maintenance of the S/4 and ERP maintenance. There's a little bit of maintenance outside, because in the lines of business, we tend to be cloud already, because we acquired these companies that were predominantly cloud companies. But on ERP, that's the way you can get some feeling. And what it tells you is that, first, there is round about a quarter that is only round about a quarter that's paying both. And it still gives us now the kind of platform to deliver to our Ambition 2025. So it shows you how little of that installed base you have been already going very far. It also shows you it's not all about conversion. There's a lot of net new in there. There's a lot of cross and upsell in there.
And three quarters have basically not paying any cloud revenues yet. And we have two paths for them. If you are on S/4 already, it's a quite easy path to go to the cloud. So there, it's more about convincing them TCO is attractive, and you get all the functionality that you can't get on-prem. So why don't you do it now? But it's not a business continuity issue. It's more about, do I need to leverage these tools now, or do I wait for later and wait for other customers to toy around with it first? And so there's different philosophies in different companies.
On the legacy systems, first and foremost, ECC, there is a little bit of a business continuity topic looming, because we cannot support them beyond 2030. You know that ECC is running on third-party databases. The licenses for these databases are expiring in 2030.
So they will be well then on their own, which is a big call. If you think about that system being a nervous system of your company, if there's any breakdown in the system, any security breach, any mishap, legal changes are not properly implemented, you have compliance violations. I mean, I would feel very uncomfortable as a CFO if I ran any major parts of my business. It's like an insurance policy that SAP is really taking care of all these issues for you. And just saying, well, I don't need that anymore, very few people tend to do that. And we even see that the guys, many people who have left to do third-party maintenance are actually coming back, because they have some hiccups. And it's not the same as our kind of continuous development, as I explained it.
Maintenance is really kind of plugging the holes in the system, as opposed to continuous development the way we do it. So there you have these both highly plausible transformation scenarios, one being a low activation energy, high upside with new functionality from S/4 to cloud, and the other one being a pure business continuity issue, where basically they have to move either to our system or a competitor system.
But then if you look at how much money it costs to really completely implement some other systems, it's even more expensive. And most of those who procrastinate tend to do it for financial reasons. And they say, I don't want to do it now, because I don't want to spend the budget. But if they go somewhere else, it's becoming even more expensive. So I'm not very nervous about these people. They can if they want, but I think we have a very attractive offer to help them with what they need to overcome.
Yeah, and realistically, there are very, very few options for large enterprises in the market in any case, even if they were to think about it.
But we have competition. We have an ERP company being very competitive. But yeah, you have also trained a lot of people on the way the system works. So it's a big, big effort. It's possible, and it's a big effort.
On that quarter of the base that are paying maintenance and cloud at the minute, do you have any idea of where they are on their journey? Are they nearly done, halfway through?
I would say my gut feeling from the data I see is that they are probably not even halfway through, even the ones who started, because we talked about the timeline. And you know when we started the whole thing. So it's already plausible from that end. And then if you look at the relative size of the revenues they generate in subscriptions and they generate in maintenance, and then you compare it to the two to three X conversion factor, you see, OK, there's still a lot remaining to do. So even on that kind of, you could argue, already converted base, the revenues are by far not converted.
So we've got 75% still to go, and there's 25% that have gone and not halfway. We're nowhere close to it.
Yes. I mean, we are starting, we are in the early innings of that transformation, which is not a transformation that, for ECC customers at least, will take forever, because there will be some reaction needed at some point in time.
So when we do the modeling and we put two to three X in the model, that obviously gives us quite a big range of outcomes. Could you help us? I mean, maybe is there an average, or could you maybe help us with what drives the upper end versus what drives the lower?
I mean, that's really, it's also hard for me to prognosticate where exactly on that range we end up over the coming years, because it depends on many factors. It depends also on the competitive dynamics. You know, for us, revenue growth and margin are a little bit of communicating vessels, and margin, of course, it has also a certain impact on revenues, because if I give bigger discounts, I have lower revenues, I have lower margin, and we have a certain aspiration to convert quickly, because as long as we are not converted with a customer, there's still a risk that you have an on-prem customer with highly customized software, which is looking for a solution now in some areas, and I have these situations today with many customers, and then they might kind of plug in a competitor solution, cloud native, still here.
And I want to avoid that. I want to get as many customers as quickly. So I'm willing to sacrifice or give higher discounts if I can convert faster. And still, this is also why we created a little bit of freedom for us by saying, don't look too much at margin. Look at the absolute gross profit we generate, because I want to have that freedom. If I see that I can accelerate more in revenues and the margin is going down a little, but I have more absolute euros of gross profit, I'm still going to do that. And so to cut a long story short, I don't want to be more specific on that, because I don't know yet. And I need that flexibility within that range to really optimize the long-term profitability in absolute euro terms on gross margin.
Sometimes I might say, OK, it's running well, so I can aspire to lower discounts, higher revenues, higher conversion factor. Sometimes I might need more pressure in the system. I want to play with that to really make sure we keep the right speed at which we convert that customer base.
But the price for you of making sure they start that journey and then you can keep competitors out in peripheral areas is much bigger than what the initial discount.
Yeah. I mean, that's the problem. That's the kind of prisoner's dilemma or bargaining dilemma with the customer. They know that when they move to the cloud, we will make more money with them. And so they can leverage themselves. And theoretically, I probably can negotiate it down to the point where you make the same money you make on-prem. And then you start kind of arm wrestling. And then the two to three X, where you end up there, is a little bit of a factor of where you end up with every individual customer on that.
We talked a little bit about competition, but maybe let's dig in a little bit deeper. I get a view from investors that, yes, you've got the Workday and Salesforce competing in the application layer. But actually, the more important battle for SAP is at the platform layer as we go forward over the next five years and ensuring customers are running BTP so that you can cross-sell more effectively, you control how the data is managed. How do you think about the competitive landscape, which is more important, and how do you manage that?
I think on BTP, the attach rates are very high, especially on RISE, where we have more complicated customers with a lot of needs and different lines of business. So I'm not nervous about that. I think you're right that to prepare for this AI game, it's all about managing the data in a smart way. And we think that we need to find ways that the data of different applications in our customer systems can be federated to keep all the semantics, all the context of the data. I always remind people that data without semantics is worth nothing. The answer, yes, is worth nothing unless you know the question.
There's another complexity in our world, which is we have laws around cloud compliance, data privacy. In finance, we have some authorization rights, what people can see what. And not everyone can see everything in our SAP system.
That would be a catastrophe from confidentiality or some other obligations. So you want to create, you want to keep the data gravity in the system itself to preserve that context of the data to really do great analytics, which means you have to federate data from different sources. And there is data also we at SAP would like to have outside the SAP system, which would be very useful for us.
For instance, if you have some world disaster somewhere and you want to replan a supply chain, you need some data on earthquakes and stuff, which is not what we do. And we are in discussions with many vendors to negotiate these partnerships, because the important thing is, of course, then the monetization. I mean, who is then getting what share of the pie? But for great analytics, you need highly structured data with good context.
The access right discussion sounds trivial and not so important, but it's super important. If you really want to go to the extreme on AI, you have three requirements on AI. It has to be relevant. It has to solve a real problem. It's nice if you create nice videos and funky stuff, but if you can't make people more productive doing their job, it doesn't help. Then it needs to be reliable. In business, it has to be reliable. We cannot afford hallucinations. It has to be at least better than human beings in terms of being reliable. And then it has to be responsible, i.e., cloud compliance and all the things around it, and these are actually contradicting targets if you think about it.
And if you just egress data from all over the place into a data lake and do analytics on top, you have a big problem, because the slightest pollution of that kind of analytics with something you have no right to see is killing the whole work. So you pollute the whole system. You have stopped doing it. On the other hand, if you don't use any data because you're scared that you are violating access rights, you have no relevance, and you have no reliability, because you have no data. So it's actually damn important to really have a system that allows you to preserve that type of structure even into the analytics layer. And you completely destroy that when you just egress data. You can try to reconstruct the semantics, but that's a big effort. And some people try to do that.
So I agree with you that that part of the equation will become more important in our discussion. But I must also say, you see me sitting here with a lot of confidence, because the gravity of data in our system is great. We have so many interesting sets of data that people want to see to run their analytics. And we have very smart systems to administer access rights. We have one source of truth systems. And we have a lot to contribute, which makes our bargaining position in these discussions really good.
And by the way, I think there's another question that I think you've just answered, which is, can companies use AI to construct systems themselves and replicate what you do using a data lake? And that replication of the complexity of how you do that is just so enormous. That's a really interesting.
It's interesting that you mentioned that. I've been confronted with that thought. My kind of socialization in large manufacturing companies was such that I was initially groomed with the thing, an ERP system. It's clear you need it. And then at some point in time, I was confronted with the idea, why couldn't you not put an analytics layer on top? You don't even need an ERP system. And I've seen companies toying around with that. I can tell you I'm not aware of any company that has been ever able to do it. And I'm not very nervous about AI getting that done.
Maybe let's dig into the AI side. You've announced Joule, the co-pilot. Could you just talk about use cases that are resonating with customers?
Look, it's a whole bunch of use cases. What I like is a lot where we have millions of people sitting in shared service centers and doing stuff and then making them more productive. That's one big lever. So to really make repetitive tasks much more automated and faster. And I mean, take a typical example in an accounts payable department. You have a screwed-up process where the number of goods received is wrong. The prices don't match the contract and stuff like that. And if you see how people grapple with that today, they spend a lot of time on every single case. And with AI, you can analyze way more data and make them smarter. I always use one.
The other thing where AI can play a huge role is when people actually don't do it so frequently and are not very sophisticated doing it, and they are not qualified enough. And the system is basically babysitting them through the process. And this sounds a little bit innocent, but I'll give you one example I've been going through how it works today and where I have a vision that this will be completely revolutionized, which is my business assistant had a whole bunch of access rights from me. I'm the CFO. I have all the access rights, of course. And I need to transfer that for certain jobs to my business assistant. And then a new business assistant came. I had to transfer these access rights to the new business assistant.
And the way it worked for me in the first place was we had a day in the diary. The guy from IT came, the old assistant, new assistant. They are sitting next to me. We're clicking through the SAP system, the Microsoft Outlook, and we change all these access rights. It takes us about 10 minutes. I see, well, that's incredibly wasteful. If I had Joule and just said, Joule, can you please transfer these access rights from old person to new person? It's done. Now, the truth is, I was then told, Dominik, you're wrong. It's not 10 minutes. We've actually spent hours this morning to figure out what access rights the prior guy actually had. So this is a nice example of where hours of work can be transformed into seconds. For me, it's a little bit the next step of the internet revolution.
The internet revolution. You as a consumer overcame the burden of going in a bricks and mortar shop, seeing where the product is there, being told it's not there, maybe waiting before in line to be told it's not there, going to another shop. So we now have mobile internet. So you do it all. And it's the same journey when you use these tools. You have an interface, which is hierarchical. You click through things. You need certain data from elsewhere. And so what we do now is we kind of shortcut that massively. And this is what makes me so excited. And now whether it takes half a year longer or not is not what I'm caring about. What I care about is how fast, who is best positioned to ultimately deliver that tool or co-pilot of any nature. You know, we have great partnerships on that.
I mean, we are also integrating, for instance, with Microsoft by now. When we schedule a trip with our Concur tool, boom, it's ending up in the calendar directly and stuff like that without the person touching it. So this is a big opportunity. People sometimes feel, because they toy around with co-pilots of other people, and they draft some emails. And when you reply to an email, I find it very hard to reply to an email using the co-pilot, because I know exactly what I want to write. And I want to be concise. And boom, I sometimes think it takes me longer to write the prompt than just writing it myself. But on these transactional tasks, I think with my example I gave you, there are things you can do where you can tremendously accelerate. And it's not all of that.
There's also the large process models we are currently developing that we are really looking at what is a guy in a shared service center doing anyhow that's independent from Joule. It's just figuring out what is the next step in the system. The same way on large language models, you say, if somebody said that, the next thing he's going to say is this and that. You say, if somebody in a shared service center is currently looking at that, probably the next thing she or he is doing is that. And then all the ecosystem we have, we have a huge we talked about the transformation. We have to transform our on-prem customers to a cloud-compliant, upgrade-ready setup, which means they have to all rewrite their custom code from on-prem into ABAP Cloud. We now train our co-pilot for ABAP. So we have a million people coding ABAP.
And now they will become much faster writing that code. And right now, we have a huge demand for that, because people have to rewrite their code to make it cloud-compliant. And we can embed the cloud compliance in the way we train the co-pilot. Then we have all these consultants. I remember when I did S/4 transition myself on the customer side, we had 70 people from the system integrator. And frankly, half of them were not any good. We had to replace them. Probably then half today, if they have a kind of co-pilot for consultants from SAP, probably are good enough to do the job done, because they have the kind of collective wisdom of all the other consultants at their fingertips. So there's all these things we can play off. And on all these activities, we are investing big time.
I have the very comfortable situation that for the Ambition 2025, I don't need tons of monetization on these opportunities. I have also the conviction that once this is matured to a level where it really works, it has tremendous potential. We have 300 million users already today in the cloud, and we're just scratching the surface. I've estimated the salary hike of that 300 million user base, and many of them using SAP a lot, is hundreds of billions. So if we can only get a small part of that productivity, and it's only the merit hike. It's not the salary base. And you also know the order of magnitude of revenues we generate, it's kind of hopefully in the kind of outer years of a planning horizon, some mid-double-digit billion revenue number. So you know that 1% of growth is only €500 million.
You compare it to these huge opportunities. So why wouldn't that be something that could add several percentage points of growth in like a five-year planning horizon? I'm deeply convinced if we do the right things and better than competition, and I try to explain why I think we have a little bit of an unfair advantage on the stuff we do, ERPs, we can certainly add some good growth momentum there.
So the focus today is in more getting usage and getting people into the cloud and using AI as something to pull them in rather than trying to monetize heavily today.
No, no. We also try to monetize. But honestly, like in every early inning of adoption, you start to incentivize for people to get hooked up on it and say, oh, I need that. And then you can kind of groom the pricing. And over time, it's not the key to really extract the maximum value in 2025, 2026. It's really the key that basically everyone says, if you want to have the most efficient back offices in the world, you need to run an SAP system. And there's no alternative to that. That's where we need to get to. And for that kind of work to be spread, you need a lot of users who feel it every day. And this is what we're currently pushing.
And you just said, if we do a better job than competition, and I'm very confident that we've got a lot of advantages. I can't resist following up on that. Could you talk a little bit around why you think you're in a much better position to do this than?
It's really the kind of 50 years plus of experience on how these processes are running, the intimacy with the customer, the contextual awareness, the access to the data, the system itself. I'd say the S/4, the HANA database was the right tool that Hasso invented. You have to think about it like a huge transactional universal ledger where every single transaction, be it hiring a person, be it paying something, is registered in one source of truth. The beauty of that, it's highly scalable. On every transaction, you can put as many attributes as you like. These attributes will later on help you a lot to be fast in analytics and not having to run expensive AI. I mean, there was this myth some years back from some companies in the kind of analytics business: don't care about structured data.
You can do everything with unstructured data. And it's probably right. But now you learn that the kind of it's like entropy in physics. And when you've created mess, it is quite cumbersome and compute-intensive to bring order back to the mess. So our philosophy is, why don't we create order in the first place? And HANA is a perfect repository for all that data to bring perfect order in and perfect order in stuff that can be extremely complex with really almost an unlimited number of attributes to bring order into it. And I think the combination of all these assets is making us quite unique. And this is also what the customers buy. And I think the numbers speak for themselves. I mean, I don't see any ERP vendor running at 30% plus growth rates right now in the cloud.
Even some other vendors who have been very high on cloud revenue growth, we are currently in the very best neighborhood in terms of what we can generate in cloud revenues.
So it's been a great discussion about the technology. And it's great to see such excitement from what's coming. But with the CFO, I suppose I have to ask a little bit about profitability and what's going on below the top line. You've said you think SAP should be a Rule of 40 company. Could you define that? And could you talk about how SAP gets there?
Yeah. I mean, I clearly said that if you look at benchmarks, a Rule of 40 is a good benchmark, and the way we define it is basically we look at the free cash flow divided by the revenues. And that's the free cash flow margin, and we add it to the consolidated revenue numbers, growth numbers. So I think we jumped off like 27, 2023. In 2025, you can calculate if you materialize it, we are pretty much more than halfway there. Now I have to make one caveat. There are some competitors running around pounding their chest and saying, I am actually a Rule of 50 company. It's few who really are. Maybe Microsoft is better than that.
You're quite hard on yourself doing free cash flow, by the way.
By the way, I'm even harder if I do internal benchmarking. When I do internal benchmarking, I say to make apples to apples, I also look at the equity settled stock-based comp and convert it to cash. And then some of the guys who pound their chest and say, I'm a Rule of 50 company aren't actually, because they have 10 percentage points more stock-based compensation to sales than these. But that's a different story. But I take the standard definition. And you see that we are covering more than half of the gap in a couple of years' time by virtue of our restructuring program. The rest has to come from accelerated revenue growth.
So we did say that because of the very, very strong mix effect with Cloud ERP Suite being 83% of cloud revenues, with that kind of center of gravity of our business running at 30% plus growth rates for more than, now it's 11 quarters in a row. And the dilutive effect from on-prem licenses, the dilutive effect from infrastructure and service business, which, contrary to our competitor, we're actually de-emphasizing. We play the hyperscalers competition against to get a good value for our customers. We can even afford a deceleration in Cloud ERP Suite growth numbers to still have an uplift on total revenue growth. So a little bit more growth on revenues beyond what is embarked in our ambition is a 12% midpoint outlook 2024 to Ambition 2025 is a 12% growth embarked. And we think we can do better than that in 2026, 2027.
And then we said we want to contain the total expense growth relative to the revenue growth in the kind of 80%-90% range, which we also see in our competitors. It's simply saying we want to be as good as our competitors. And we have, I think, a whole bunch of measures in place that will enable us to do that. So the restructuring program we are currently completing, we are about to complete, not only has the goal of making a big leap forward on that Rule of 40 logic, but even putting a gradient in place that in the following years we can accelerate. Now, I don't want to be nailed when exactly that will happen.
That's the next question.
Because between 80%-90% fall through in the cost, it's a big difference when you can reach it. Whether you add 1 percentage point acceleration from 2025 to 2026 or more makes a big difference. And I don't know yet. But this is definitely something that doesn't look stupid. And I also remind our people internally that our competition is not standing still. So maybe once we are there, maybe our competitors are even higher. So we have to keep on running all the time.
Perfect. I'm just aware of the time. I'll maybe open up to the floor to see if there are any questions from the audience. Take one from maybe let me carry on then. I think another question I get really regularly is there obviously is a big restructuring program this year. There's been some change at the management level at SAP. Could you just talk a little bit about how you manage that amount of change in the company in one go, the risks that some things that otherwise would have been spotted fall through the cracks? I think most people feel there is room for a lot of productivity improvements at SAP. But people aren't doing zero. They're contributing something to the company.
No, no, no. I mean, it's a huge challenge to have so many balls in the air and a lot of reconfiguration happening as we speak. You might have seen that. The way we think about our staff is that we are going to eliminate by the end of this restructuring program 9,000-10,000 positions. We'll rehire at a similar tune. So we will end up actually with slightly more people. Now we also did an acquisition WalkMe which gave us 800 incremental people. So we end up probably even higher than that. So that's a massive effort. And of course, things can fall through the cracks when you do that. But I'd say there are some improvement areas within SAP where the dysfunctionality penalty is so high that the risk-return profile of tackling them is very attractive.
Because you can allow quite some mistakes in execution and still be better off doing it, and I think I'll give you one example where I'm really convinced it's of ultimate importance to our long-term future and that we need to tackle now is we have a great product now with GROW and our public cloud multi-tenant offering. But our go-to-market motion is still quite heavy in terms of old style with a lot of people from lines of business. How do you want to sell a kind of €500,000 TCV mid-market deal with the type of large enterprise go-to-market way of doing things where you have to feed the mouths of expensive sellers in each line of business of SAP? That doesn't work. You have to really do something radically differently, and it's no rocket science, frankly.
We can look at our competitors who are more on that market and see how they do it, and we see a big gap, and now the issue is you might be bogged down in the day-to-day and don't find the time for that, and this is why it's actually very good, I think, that now Christian Klein, our CEO, is taking over temporarily that sales function because he said, look, I know it's tough. We are not under so much pressure on some things that can screw up our numbers on sales. I mean, you know the biggest sensitivity on cash flow and revenue and profit is still license income if you have tons of license revenues or not. We have been prudent in planning it. We have done very well so far, so we don't need miracles in the Q4, to put it mildly.
So we've de-risked that in the way we think about it. So we've created the room for a little bit of a disruption on some areas. We tell the people, don't worry about it. Let's go on cloud. That's not kind of if a license deal is slipping into Q1, not a problem. And we are forcing through these changes now. Changes are always unpopular. I have to confess you've seen a little bit of our employee engagement index dip. But I'm also confident that this will come back. I mean, every transformation has a price. And the whole team is motivated. The good news is why we are still also quite resilient despite some disruption is that the lion's share of the heavy lifting right now on the growth is coming from RISE journeys with large customers. And there you have big teams on both sides.
If one or two people disappear from the team, there is enough kind of inertia, so to speak, to keep pulling the project on. It's not depending on one rainmaker salespeople now pushing the button. So I think I'm not too worried about that. I'm, to the contrary, much more excited about eradicating some dysfunctionalities which were blatantly obvious to us and have not been tackled because we were all too busy rushing for the quarter. And now it's the time to do it. And Christian is on top of it. So nobody dares to say it's the wrong thing because it's the CEO who's running the show now. So it's about transformation as we speak. And I think it will. I mean, there are so many good things that I observe since I came how things have improved.
For instance, in my shop, I mean, a huge issue is the quotes we give to customers. We want to double them over the next three years, and before it was virtually impossible between sales and finance to converge a view which is a global optimum, how you manage complexity in Ts and Cs and how you price and make it more algorithmic, and this was because everyone had their own resources to do that, and they all optimized the local optimum. Now we integrated all these operations in one cluster, and they go for end-to-end process, and they optimize the global optimum, and it's tough, and I have good confidence it will work, and I asked the team actually who of you thinks that we would have been able to get that level of confidence to be much more automated and algorithmic on that in the old setup?
And people said zero chance. They said it's not a done deal yet in a new system. But had we been stuck where we were, zero chance. So I see there's many things falling into place. I see the transformation as a much bigger opportunity than, of course, there is some disruption. But it's a very good risk-return profile in terms of tackling it.
Perfect. I'm bumping up against time there. Do we have one? Can we just take one question? Do you want to just? I'll just worry that a microphone .
You shout it out and repeat it.
Yeah. Can you talk about Asia Pacific, that's a particularly strong quarter? And what's the durability of the growth in India, Japan, and you called out China as well?
OK. Great question. You've seen that we did really well in terms of growth rates there. These are very, very different markets. I mean, Japan, I think the opportunity is a super fragmented market with a lot of domestic tiny suppliers. I do believe that with AI, ERP becomes more a winner-takes-it-all thing. Because what you need for AI is tons of data. And the smaller suppliers don't have the data to train their models on. So I'm excited about Japan. We've actually decided to invest more in marketing in Japan because we are not so big. But it's still the fourth or fifth biggest market of SAP. India is, of course, how do we go in the mid-market, very many, many customers. So it's very relevant what I told you about reconfiguring the sales machine.
I can tell you with a large enterprise sales machine like SAP has it today, India is just off limits, and you mentioned China. China is the geopolitical topic, probably the trickiest one, so I don't think we can deal with that in zero-.
Pretend out of line.
But you know we are not too exposed to China in terms of revenue base. We have a lot of business with multinational companies who have their subsidiaries in China. Many of the Chinese customers or state-owned enterprises, they do a lot themselves. But I think there's more upside than downside because we start from a low base relative to our competitive strength in other regions of the world.
Perfect. Well, I'll close with that, Dominik. Great discussion. Thank you again for joining us.
Thanks for having me .
Thank you.