{"id":383,"date":"2006-05-19T10:02:57","date_gmt":"2006-05-19T16:02:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=383"},"modified":"2006-05-19T10:02:57","modified_gmt":"2006-05-19T16:02:57","slug":"is_sap_for_sale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=383","title":{"rendered":"Is SAP for sale?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s exceedingly rare for senior executives to speculate publicly about the sale of their company, so when one does it &#8211; as Hasso Plattner, chairman and major shareowner of the corporate software giant SAP did yesterday &#8211; you have to wonder what kind of signal he&#8217;s trying to send. In an interview with the German edition of the Financial Times, Plattner implied that SAP &#8220;is open to an acquisition by US technology groups,&#8221; according to a <a href=\"http:\/\/news.ft.com\/cms\/s\/41744f42-e6a0-11da-a36e-0000779e2340.html\">report<\/a> on the interview in the FT today. Here&#8217;s what Plattner said:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cThere are only three potential buyers: IBM, Microsoft and Google. I don\u2019t see anyone else. If shareholders think that a combination, and not independence, is better, then it will happen &#8230; You have to be emotionless.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Regarding a merger with IBM specifically, Plattner said:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cI do not want to invent rumours because there are no talks. However, I do not want to say that I dislike IBM so much that I could not imagine such a scenario at all.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>SAP&#8217;s PR apparatus is in high gear this morning, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/business\/feeds\/afx\/2006\/05\/19\/afx2758761.html\">trying<\/a> to squelch speculation about a sale. Still, when a guy who owns about 11% of a big company&#8217;s stock, as Plattner <a href=\"http:\/\/www.heise.de\/english\/newsticker\/news\/73326\">reportedly<\/a> does, opens the door to a takeover in an interview with a major newspaper, you have to assume he knows what he&#8217;s doing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s exceedingly rare for senior executives to speculate publicly about the sale of their company, so when one does it &#8211; as Hasso Plattner, chairman and major shareowner of the corporate software giant SAP did yesterday &#8211; you have to wonder what kind of signal he&#8217;s trying to send. In an interview with the German [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}