Potential of Chinese market unlimited: SAP Co-CEO

FRANKFURT - "The potential of the Chinese market is unlimited for us," said Jim Snabe, one of the Co-CEOs of SAP, headquartered in Germany and the world's leading enterprise application software company, in an interview with Xinhua.

"Small and medium enterprises in China are key for SAP," he said, adding that SAP innovations made for China would be in areas that are critical for the country such as energy or transportation management, as well as in e-commerce or electronic retailing.

In 2011, SAP announced a $2 billion investment plan until 2015 to significantly grow its business and presence in China.

"Today, we have offices in more than 12 cities, we have more than 6,000 customers and more than 450 partners in China. We doubled our staff to more than 4,200 people today," he said.

Looking at the first half of 2013, Snabe said SAP has had slower growth in China, which had affected results of the Asian Pacific region overall. But in Q3, SAP in Asia Pacific Japan returned to growth with a solid single digit growth in software and cloud subscription revenue.

"Especially China, which is a locomotive for Asia, recovered strongly, bringing SAP double digit growth," he said.

According to Snabe, cloud, HANA, a realtime analysing database, as well as mobile solutions are of strategic importance to SAP.

"Our cloud business grew more than 160 percent this quarter. HANA revenue, our real time database technology, grew by more than 90 percent. SAP is not only performing well, but leading the change," said Snabe.

He also confirmed the company's outlook of more than 750 million euros cloud revenue as well as between 650 to 700 million euros HANA revenue.

Snabe reiterated that an important part of SAP's strategy is an open ecosystem approach, which allows customers to get more choice and opportunities. The same is true for the Chinese market.

"Today we have more than 450 partners in China including longstanding technology partnerships with Huawei and Lenovo. And we will further accelerate partnerships in key areas such as cloud, mobile and HANA," he said.

Snabe sees lots of opportunities for SAP in helping Chinese companies to globalize their business.

"There are millions of companies in China wanting to become truly global. SAP can help them to achieve this goal," he said. On Nov 20-21, SAP is hosting its SAPPHIRE NOW conference for customers and partners in Beijing for the third time in a row.

Many of the solutions implemented by customers have been developed in China. SAP's innovations are relevant and important for the Chinese market.

"HANA will revolutionize the real time analysis of data. Cloud makes it easier to consume our software. We have 900 million mobile subscribers. Our opportunities to reach more users with our software in business and as consumers are fantastic," Snabe said.