SAP to lay off 3,000 employees and explore the sale of Qualtrics, a survey startup it acquired in 2018 for $8 billion

German enterprise software giant SAP announced Wednesday it will be laying off 3,000 employees, or about 2.5% of its workforce. In addition to the layoff, SAP also said that it was exploring the sale of its stake in US-based survey software maker Qualtrics, which it acquired in November 2018 for $8 billion.

During the fourth-quarter 2022 earnings call, SAP CEO Christian Klein said: “We are further focusing our portfolio in areas where we are strongest to continue our accelerated growth.”Klein also added:

“This led us to announce today that we intend to carry out a very targeted restructuring in select areas of the company that will impact up to 3,000 positions and include a headcount reduction of about 2.5%.”

SAP is the latest in a series of big tech companies to announce major layoffs this month. Last week, Google’s parent company Alphabet also announced it would lay off 12,000 employees as companies stake their futures on artificial intelligence (AI).

Microsoft also said it would lay off 10,000 jobs instead of the 11,000 reported by major news outlets. In addition to the layoff, the Redmond-based company also said that it would take a  $1.2-billion charge as its cloud-computing customers dissect their spending and the company braces for a potential recession. The layoff is far larger than the 1,000 job cuts the company announced back in October 2020.

With just four weeks into 2023, more than 59, 448 tech workers have lost their jobs, according to Layoffs.FYI, a site that has been tracking all tech layoffs using data compiled from public reports.

We wrote about Qualtrics four years ago after the company was acquired for $8 billion in an all-cash deal. The announcement came just before Qualtrics planned IPO.

Qualtrics is a software maker which competes with SurveyMonkey in the survey software market. Qualtrics is a competitor of SurveyMonkey. However, Qualtrics has a much richer feature set than SurveyMonkey. Qualtrics has grown faster over the years and is also more profitable.

Qualtrics was originally founded in 2002 by Jared Smith, Ryan Smith, and Stuart Orgill. The company provides a technology platform that organizations use to collect, manage, and act on experience data, also called X-data. The Qualtrics XM Platform is a system of action, used by teams, departments, and entire organizations to manage the four core experiences of business—customer, product, employee, and brand—on one platform.

Over 9,000 enterprises worldwide, including more than 75 percent of the Fortune 100 and 99 of the top 100 U.S. business schools, rely on Qualtrics to consistently build products that people love, create more loyal customers, develop a phenomenal employee culture, and build iconic brands.