Antitrust
EU Commission is investigated against software-giant SAP
The EU Commission is investigating SAPS business practices. The group is said to have used its market position to request high fees for unused services.
The European Commission has initiated a procedure against the German software company SAP due to alleged violations of EU competition rules. SAP may have exploited its supremacy on the market to demand high payments for its maintenance and customer service, the EU Commission announced on Thursday. SAP can now approach Brussels and change parts of his business model to avert a fine.
The EU Commission assumes that SAP has supremacy in the maintenance and customer service of its software. Among other things, the German group secures this by the fact that the service is automatically part of a SAP license without corporate customers being able to choose another provider. By automatically extending the license term, SAP also ensures that a change is hardly possible.
EU Commission: Companies pay for maintenance service, even if they do not use it
Companies are also forced to pay for SAPs maintenance service for software that they did not use at all, the EU competition keepers continued. If a customer decides to terminate the SAP service for a certain period of time, fees were incurred for this, which are sometimes as high as the costs of SAP services in the same period.
This business model could have disproportionately limited competition among software providers in the EU, “which causes European customers to make fewer selections and higher costs,” said EU Competition Commissioner Teresa Ribera. The Commission wants to ensure “that companies that rely on the software from SAP can freely select the maintenance and service services that best suit them”.
SAP threatens a high level of fine
There is no deadline for the procedure that has now been initiated. If the allegations of the EU Commission are confirmed, SAP threatens a maximum of ten percent of the annual global corporate turnover. Measured by the SAP turnover of the past year, the maximum penalty would be around 3.4 billion euros.
SAP is the most valuable company in the German stock index and is a worldwide leading provider of software and cloud services for companies. The software is used, among other things, in personnel management. The group has its headquarters in Walldorf in Baden-Württemberg.
AFP
RW
Source: Stern
