SAP rejects calls for a pan-European IT champion

November 28, 2013 Leave a comment

SAP rejects calls for a pan-European IT champion

10:34am EST

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Germany’s biggest tech company, SAP, has rejected calls by domestic politicians for European IT firms to band together to better compete against U.S. tech groups in the wake of spying allegations. Some German politicians have suggested an IT industry equivalent to European jetmaker Airbus following allegations about U.S. spying on Europeans, including the monitoring of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone.“A merger between some European IT companies with the aim of drawing a line between them and the rest of the global market, does not make any sense,” SAP co-Chief Executive Jim Hagemann Snabe said on Wednesday, in an e-mailed response to questions from Reuters.

“Such an endeavor would be doomed to fail from the outset,” he said, adding it would lead to less competition, less innovation and less growth in a globally-focused sector.

Government snooping is a sensitive subject in Germany, which has among the strictest privacy laws in the world, since it dredges up memories of eavesdropping by the Stasi secret police in the former East Germany.

German politicians in favor of IT companies teaming up, such as Merkel, argue it would make Europe less dependent on U.S. technology and data groups including Microsoft, Google and Cisco.

It would copy the success of planemaker Airbus, part of European group EADS, which compete head-to-head with U.S. rival Boeing in the global aerospace market.

Hagemann Snabe said Europe’s IT sector needed to promote competition and foster young talent. “This way we will create the next generation of young IT companies in Europe, thus ensuring growth and progress,” he said.

While some of SAP’s U.S. rivals have said they were expecting setbacks from the spying allegations, SAP said the current debate around privacy in Europe is helping its business.

Still, the company will not proactively launch a campaign as it does not want to offend its U.S. customers.

Hagemann Snabe made a plea for international standards for data protection both in Europe and the United States, echoing European telecoms commissioner Neelie Kroes.

The European Parliament’s civil liberties committee recently voted for a tougher data privacy regime in Europe.

That vote cleared the way for negotiations with member states, with the aim of having a new code of conduct agreed by May next year, the first fundamental updating of Europe’s data protection laws since 1995.

Filed under TMT Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

Leave a comment