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WALLDORF (dpa-AFX) - Hasso Plattner has taken his time in finding his successor. The co-founder of SAP has chaired the supervisory board of the Walldorf-based software company (Rhein-Neckar district) since 2003. Recently, criticism from shareholders of the slow transfer of power at the top of the supervisory body has become louder. Late on Wednesday evening, the supervisory board then presented a successor. Manager Punit Renjen, until recently global head of the consulting firm Deloitte, had been nominated by the Supervisory Board as a new member and proposed as Plattner's designated successor.

This ends a long search. Plattner had already announced in 2017 that he would stay on - "but not for a full five years". That's what it turned out to be. Last year - five years later - Plattner had himself re-elected to the Supervisory Board for two years. "Putting my position as chairman of the Supervisory Board in the right hands is a very important and also emotional task for me, and one that I have been working on for some time," Plattner said.

The 79-year-old has spent much of his life at SAP. In 1972, he co-founded the company with former IBM employees Dietmar Hopp, Klaus Tschira, Hans-Werner Hector and Claus Wellenreuther. Today, SAP is one of Germany's most valuable corporations and Europe's largest software manufacturer. Before joining the Supervisory Board, Plattner was the company's CEO from 1997 to 2003. Of the five founders, Plattner is the only one who still holds an office in the group.

The company has made Plattner one of the richest Germans. He is one of SAP's largest shareholders. The business magazine "Forbes" estimates the fortune of Plattner and his family at 8.1 billion US dollars. As a patron of the arts, he likes to put his money into art. In Potsdam, for example, the collector and lover of impressionist paintings built the Barberini art museum. Not far from there, IT specialists are being trained at the Hasso Plattner Institute. The sailor and electric guitarist is also the owner of the San Jose Sharks, a team from the U.S. professional ice hockey league NHL.

Plattner had actually hoped for an internal solution for his successor as chairman of SAP's supervisory board. "But the plan fell through," Plattner told the Handelsblatt newspaper (Thursday). It was "not so easy to pull a successor out of the hat." The search among former board members had also not worked out. For this reason, the Supervisory Board has also approached external applicants. The contact to Punit Renjen was ultimately established by SAP CEO Christian Klein, who had business dealings with him in the USA. "Punit was immediately interested," said Plattner.

If the 61-year-old is elected to the supervisory board at the annual general meeting in May, that would begin the transition process, according to the statement. Renjen has "valuable strategic experience and knowledge of the needs of companies in today's rapidly changing environments," it said. Renjen, who was Deloitte's chief executive from 2015 until the end of 2022, has a deep understanding of the needs of global clients, as well as SAP's potential. Pleased to be considered for the role, Renjen said, according to the release: "SAP is an outstanding company with a key role in the global economy." He looks forward to helping shape the future, Renjen said.

The software maker is undergoing a transformation. For more than two years, Group CEO Klein has been driving the transformation. He wants to transform the core business with software licenses for corporate management into a cloud-based subscription model. However, the investments in the future are initially being made at the expense of earnings. At the end of January, Klein said SAP had now reached an important turning point and demonstrated "that SAP is now a real cloud company."

2022 revenue rose 11 percent to 30.9 billion euros, thanks in part to a pickup in cloud software business for use over the network. But bottom-line net income plunged by a good two-thirds year-over-year to 1.71 billion euros, mainly because venture investments in startups did not contribute as much valuation income as before. At the end of January, SAP announced plans to cut 3,000 jobs - including around 200 in Germany. SAP wants to focus on its core business of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, it said. The cuts would be made in areas where the company was less successful./rwi/DP/jha