SAP shares surge as first-quarter earnings beat market view on cost discipline

(Reuters) -Shares in SAP, Europe's largest software maker, surged 8.5% on Wednesday after the German company exceeded first-quarter profit forecasts, benefiting from cost cuts and defying business uncertainty from U.S. tariffs.

The stock's gain at 0735 GMT put it on track for its biggest one-day increase in more than five years, recovering some of the losses it has suffered since mid-February amid a wider market scare over U.S. trade policy.

SAP, which is riding a boom in demand for its cloud-based offerings spurred by artificial intelligence, also confirmed its full-year cloud revenue targets.

The provider of systems to run finance, sales, supply chain and other corporate functions on Tuesday reported an adjusted operating profit of 2.5 billion euros ($2.86 billion) for the first quarter, beating analysts' expectations for 2.22 billion.

Analysts said the stock performance was due to improved results on the most important metrics - free cash flow, cloud order backlog and operating profit - and SAP maintaining its outlook for cloud revenues in a range of 21.6 billion euros ($24.60 billion) to 21.9 billion euros for this year.

Investors had concerns, though, on the potential impact of U.S. tariffs.

Finance chief Dominik Asam said the operating profit was "testament to our cost discipline".

The group is in the middle of a cost-cutting drive and has previously announced up to 10,000 jobs out of its 100,000 total headcount were under review as it prepares for an era of AI, projecting restructuring costs of around 3 billion euros.

CEO Christian Klein said he had not yet observed any reluctance to invest among SAP customers, who were relying on his company's software to react to any changed framework conditions.

But general uncertainty could not be explained away, he said, adding: "Everyone is keeping a close eye on what happens in the next 90 days."

Trump had suspended the import tariffs he had imposed on most countries for this period.

Given the recent share price decline due to a tariff row between the U.S. and China, the earnings beat will be taken as a positive by the market, said analysts at Baader.

"Overall, this is a strong set of results and illustrates the resilience and defensiveness of SAP's earnings trajectory," JPMorgan wrote.

($1 = 0.8780 euros)

(Reporting by Rishabh Jaiswal, Miranda Murray and Ludwig Burger; Editing by Kirsti Knolle, Bernadette Baum and Jan Harvey)