VIENNA/BERLIN, Dec 3 ? Germany's SAP has agreed to buy U.S. cloud-computing software company SuccessFactors for $40 a share in cash, a major move into web-based software.
SAP said the deal gave SuccessFactors an enterprise value of around $3.4 billion and represented a premium of 52 percent over both Friday's closing price and the one-month volume-weighted average price.
"While our growth remains primarily organic, where we can innovate faster with acquisitions, we take action. In this case, to become a cloud powerhouse," SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott told a hastily arranged conference call with journalists and analysts.
The move means SAP can beat its target of generating 20 billion euros ($26.9 billion) in revenue by 2015 while maintaining its 35 percent margin goal, company officials said.
The SuccessFactors deal is more about generating top-line growth than wringing out cost synergies, they said.
Paul Hamerman, an analyst at technology research group Forrester, said SAP was paying a substantial premium to acquire SuccessFactors but its own cloud strategy had been lagging.
"By acquiring SuccessFactors, SAP puts itself into a much stronger competitive position in human resources applications and reaffirms its commitment to software-as-a-service as a key business model," he said.
Companies and other organisations are increasingly moving into cloud computing, in which big providers such as Amazon, Google or Salesforce.com host data and processing remotely as the complexity of doing so increases.
Forrester estimates the cloud computing market will grow from $40.7 billion in 2011 to more than $241 billion in 2020.
CATCHING UP
SAP has made some major acquisitions in the past, including Sybase and Business Objects, but analysts have warned that it risked losing ground to rival Oracle in the race for cloud computing technology.
Oracle in October announced a $1.5 billion deal to buy cloud computing firm RightNow Technologies, a rival of SAP.
Salesforce.com pioneered cloud computing for companies and is still the market leader in software that helps manage relations with customers.
SAP has slowly begun to gain traction with its Business by Design software aimed at mid-sized companies and reiterated on Saturday it aims to have around 1,000 customers there by year-end.
SuccessFactors will remain an independently run unit in the group. Its founder and Chief Executive Lars Dalgaard will run SAP's cloud business and is set to join SAP's executive board.
Dalgaard said the deal would accelerate SuccessFactors' roadmap by 10 years. It now has more than 3,500 customers and a total of 15 million paying users.
SAP said it would take a 1 billion euro ($1.34 billion) term loan to help fund the acquisition, which it said would be slightly dilutive to earnings per share next year and accretive thereafter. It was set to close in the first quarter of 2012.
SuccessFactors' operating margin jumped to 9 percent in the third quarter from zero a year earlier, and the company said it could not hire quickly enough to meet demand.
Its shares, which were first listed at $10 apiece four years ago, have gained 26 percent over the past three months, giving the company a market value of about $2.2 billion.
The company, which makes software used by firms to review employee performance and competes with Taleo Corp and Kenexa Corp, has said it expects its 2011 revenue to jump by about 59 percent but has not given a profit outlook.
(Reporting by Georgina Prodhan, Maria Sheahan, Michael Shields and Nadia Damouni)
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