ECB's Schnabel Says Rate-Cutting Campaign Is Coming to an End
The European Central Bank's interest-rate cutting campaign may soon be over, with inflation and the economy both on track, Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel said.
'This monetary-policy cycle is coming to an end as medium-term inflation is stabilizing around target,' the German official said Thursday in Brussels. She described underlying consumer-price growth — projected to be 1.9% in 2026 and 2027 — as 'right at target.'
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Yahoo
25 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Europe's most valuable boss? How Christian Klein went from a 15-year-old intern to SAP's savior
May has been quite a month for Christian Klein, the baby-faced boss of Europe's most valuable company, SAP. He has just finished off his opening keynote at SAP's Sapphire event in Madrid, a summit attended by more than 6,000 people, when he finds time to squeeze in a putt-off on the main stage with Team Europe's 2014 Ryder Cup captain, Paul McGinley. A hole in one (on his second attempt) seems a fitting celebration. The false start nature of his foray on the putting green is reflective of his time at the helm of SAP, with his latest landmark the culmination of a tumultuous introduction, several false starts, and an overhaul of the company's organizational structure. Boasting a market value of $350 billion as of the end of May, SAP outpaced a struggling Novo Nordisk and a stunted luxury retail sector in March to confirm the unusual sighting of a German tech group atop Europe's public markets. Novo Nordisk reclaimed the mantle on the morning of June 13. The feat tops off a remarkable rise for the enterprise resource planning group, which is toasting record revenues and profits after a bet on cloud computing coincided with a global AI pivot that has seen demand for the company's business processes suite skyrocket. Fortune spoke with members of SAP's C-suite and leadership team to understand how Klein approached the mammoth task of turning a disparate SAP into Europe's most valuable company. Klein, just 45 years old, knows SAP better than most of the 120,000 people working at the company today. He first joined as a 15-year-old summer intern, ferrying clunky monitors around SAP's Walldorf headquarters with one eye on a professional football career. 'I can still remember, I tested them all, and one out of 10 didn't work,' Klein told Fortune in Madrid. 'In our area, SAP is a logical choice,' Klein says of the fateful application to the company he would run decades later. Indeed, former classmates of his continue to work at the company, though he's not as close to them as he was then. SAP offers software packages that help businesses deal with all sorts of admin, like HR, supply-chain management, and procurement, also known as enterprise resource planning (ERP). Klein throws his head back with laughter as this reporter suggests it's not the most exciting subject matter for the layperson to try to care about. His time at the helm of the company, though, has betrayed the dull, bureaucratic principles on which SAP has made its billions. Following the departure of its previous boss, ServiceNow's American CEO, Bill McDermott, the software as a service (SaaS) provider faced criticism that it was a bloated amalgam of various acquisitions with no obvious plans to align them. McDermott and SAP got it in the neck on more than one occasion from executives at one of its main competitors, Oracle. The late former Oracle co-CEO, Mark Hurd, was critical of the company's acquisition strategy in 2019 after SAP's $8 billion move for experience management platform Qualtrics. 'We're not buying somebody to just buy them. We're buying companies that fit into our portfolio,' Hurd said at the time. It was under this cloud of uncertainty that Klein took on the role of co-CEO alongside Jennifer Morgan in 2019. In April 2020, Klein assumed the mantle of CEO alone, a month into global lockdowns, after Morgan abruptly stepped down. Sebastian Steinhaeuser, SAP's chief operating officer, first worked with Klein in 2020 as a consultant at Boston Consulting Group, ironing out a presidency-style plan for Klein's first 100 days in charge. Something about that time with Klein persuaded Steinhaeuser to jump on board, even if it raised eyebrows among his confidants. 'I think the general perception when I joined SAP, many friends and colleagues looked at me like, 'What are you doing? Like, are you sure?'' said Steinhaeuser. 'I think there was a time where instead of executing, [SAP] just defined a new strategy every two years. Every year, customers would sit here at Sapphire, we talked about the year before, if we had delivered it or not delivered it, and just pulled a new rabbit out of the hat.' Within a few months of taking sole charge of the company, Klein had to abandon a medium-term profitability forecast as the worst economic effects of the coronavirus kicked in. 'I think the stock got a hit of 20% or 25%, and everybody thought, 'It's crazy. Why would you do that?'' recalls Jan Gilg, SAP's chief revenue officer, of reactions to the guidance call. 'But then, in retrospect, you see that it was the only option he had.' Some of Klein's other big calls have been met with frustration from within his own ranks. SAP announced plans for a 10,000-strong headcount reduction in January last year. The company faced €3.1 billion in 'restructuring expenses' as a result of the deal, and retrained thousands of workers to adjust to its AI-first approach. An internal company survey released the following September, reported by Bloomberg, revealed more than half of SAP's employees were ready to join a competitor. Klein's proponents would argue his experience demonstrates what a CEO can achieve with the proper mandate for revolution. In that regard, it's not hyperbolic to compare Klein to Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO who increased the value of the company 10-fold in his first decade in charge by pivoting the firm first from PCs to cloud computing, then to the AI era. Just ask Muhammad Alam, a man who has worked with both CEOs, about the comparison. Alam heads up SAP's product and engineering board and is a member of the company's executive board. A 17-year Microsoft veteran, Alam left a cushy role as corporate vice president at the company's Dynamics 365 ERP (enterprise resource planning) division to join a then-uncertain SAP project. One of the reasons Alam took the leap of faith was Klein. 'I felt three years ago when I joined—and having seen Satya sort of transform Microsoft beginning in 2014—I felt the same level of energy, vision, and commitment from Christian and the leadership team here,' Alam said of the parallels between Klein and Nadella. 'I felt like he had both the ability to make the hard decisions and the energy and the commitment to see them through; because some of them aren't going to be popular with employees and others, if you will, but they're needed for the transformation.' Unlike Nadella's journey of being parachuted into Microsoft, it must have been a challenge for Klein to diagnose the strategy shift required at a company he had known intimately since his teens. Examples of long-running CEOs at Fortune 500 companies are rare. Burnout, a lack of experience, or boardroom preference for an outsider mean the onetime graduate rarely progresses to the boardroom. BMW's Oliver Zipse and General Motors' Mary Barra are two rare examples of CEOs who have worked at the same company for their entire careers. When that happens, Klein, unsurprisingly, sees it as an advantage. 'In the early days of becoming a CEO, it was of extreme value to understand who my stakeholders are. Because the transformation is not only about, 'Oh, we are now developing all software in the cloud,' it's a transformation for everyone. Everything is changing. And that's why I would say, in this situation, it was definitely a big plus,' Klein says on the advantages of being a lifer at SAP. 'I had to make sure that I communicated extremely often. All hands, investor meetings, customer meetings, because you have to explain more than once why this change is needed.' The rewards have been lucrative. In February, Klein secured a record $19.8 million payday for his efforts turning around SAP in 2024, a 165% increase on the year before. SAP stock surged to make it Europe's most valuable company weeks later. After an aggressive five-year overhaul, the outside observer would be pretty confident in declaring Klein had afforded himself the space to relax. Instead, though, Klein appears emboldened to go further, and look to the U.S.'s dominant tech sector. 'I would say I'm a bit more demanding than at the beginning, where there was sheer uncertainty. And I just had to make sure, as a leader, that everyone believes that the strategy is the right one. Now everyone believes in the strategy. Now it's about, 'How can we raise the bar and compete with the biggest tech companies in the world?'' This story was originally featured on Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
BioNTech buys mRNA, courtroom rival CureVac in all-stock deal
This story was originally published on BioPharma Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily BioPharma Dive newsletter. COVID vaccine maker BioNTech is buying rival CureVac, announcing Thursday an all-stock deal weeks before the two companies were due to face off in a German court over potentially billions of dollars worth of royalties related to intellectual property on messenger RNA drugs. Per deal terms, each CureVac share will be exchanged for about $5.46 worth of BioNTech's U.S.-listed shares, valuing the company at $1.25 billion. Upon the deal's close, CureVac shareholders will own between 4% and 6% of BioNTech. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, BioNTech and CureVac were among the companies racing to develop the first coronavirus vaccines. BioNTech, however, partnered with Pfizer and won approval of the first COVID-19 shot, while CureVac's program never made it to market. The two companies have since been embroiled in patent litigation. CureVac was a leading candidate to develop the first COVID-19 vaccine, launching rumors, later denied, that the U.S. government might even buy the company or its research. But while BioNTech and fellow mRNA drugmaker Moderna succeeded in making vaccines that saved millions of lives and earned billions of dollars in revenue, CureVac fell short. Its initial project wasn't effective enough at preventing sickness, prompting it to scrap development. A year later, CureVac sued BioNTech, claiming it infringed four patents. CureVac has since changed course, selling off most rights to influenza and COVID-19 vaccines to partner GSK and focusing on cancer instead. But its legal spat with BioNTech has lingered. The European Patent Office had upheld two CureVac patents, and a trial in a Dusseldorf regional court was set on July 1 to determine if BioNTech had infringed on them. A separate trial in the U.S. was scheduled to begin Sept. 8 in Virginia. Some Wall Street analysts, as a result, speculated that BioNTech's primary purpose is buying CureVac is to sidestep the risk of a loss in court. A single-digit percentage royalty awarded to CureVac could've cost BioNTech as much as $3 billion, Evercore ISI analyst Umer Raffat wrote in a note to clients. 'It seems to us that [BioNTech] assessed the cost of a cash settlement as substantially greater than the cost of buying [CureVac] outright,' Raffat wrote. The deal could also help BioNTech further its oncology ambitions. Like CureVac, BioNTech has made cancer research a top priority. It's invested in a variety of programs, from cell therapies to mRNA vaccines and a coveted type of bispecific antibody. Some are in advanced testing. CureVac's cancer vaccines are in earlier phases of development. A brain cancer shot has delivered early clinical data, while a lung cancer immunotherapy was cleared in April for human testing. The deal should help CureVac because of 'the early stage of the oncology pipeline and the need for a development partner to effectively compete in personalized cancer vaccines – which [BioNTech] is well positioned to execute,' wrote Leerink Partners analyst Mani Foroohar. Raffat, of Evercore ISI, however, wrote that the deal ascribes 'very little value' to CureVac's pipeline. Recommended Reading Recursion to acquire two Canadian drug discovery startups Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Yahoo
David Lynch Explains Florian Wirtz's Liverpool Move
Liverpool's Elite Move for Florian Wirtz Signals a Bold New Era Florian Wirtz Deal Shows Liverpool Are Shopping Top Shelf Liverpool supporters woke up to a seismic shift on Friday the 13th. Contrary to superstition, it proved a day of jubilation as the club confirmed a deal with Bayer Leverkusen for Florian Wirtz. As revealed on Anfield Index's Media Matters podcast, journalist David Lynch was unequivocal in describing it: 'This is a huge, huge transfer.' Speaking with host Dave Davis, Lynch highlighted the rarity and scale of this kind of signing: 'To win one of those races is rare… Liverpool have seen off every competitor to sign one of the most exciting young players in world football.' That list of competitors, notably including Bayern Munich and Manchester City, makes the capture all the more impressive. Recruitment Confidence and a Club on the Rise Though Liverpool's recruitment strategy has historically leaned towards undervalued talents, Lynch was quick to stress that this isn't a shift in philosophy. 'People at Liverpool actually suggest to you this isn't actually a departure from our approach,' he said. 'Every time there's a transformational signing on the market who wants to join us… we will push the money out there.' Advertisement He added that the attacking profile naturally drives the fee up — reported in UK media as £100 million plus £16 million in potential bonuses — but reaffirmed confidence in the club's current recruitment staff. 'They've been able to convince him this is the right place in sporting merit over other places,' said Lynch. The role of key Liverpool figures also came under praise. Lynch noted, 'Well done to Richard Hughes… well done to Arne Slot.' It's understood that their meeting with Wirtz was pivotal, showcasing not just a vision of collective success but also a tailored development path. More Than Just a Fee: Wirtz's Character and Commitment What stands out is not just the financial package or the skill set Wirtz brings, but the player's decision-making. 'City would have been the easy option. Bayern Munich would have been the easy option,' Lynch emphasised. 'To come to Liverpool, to accept lesser wages because you believe in the sporting project… for me is something special.' Advertisement While Lynch acknowledged he's no expert on German football personalities, he drew a telling comparison with another transformative Liverpool signing. 'It was hugely significant that Virgil van Dijk chose Liverpool,' he explained. Wirtz's decision to join despite more lucrative options, in Lynch's eyes, hints at a character aligned with Liverpool's ethos. What Wirtz Brings to Liverpool's Attack On the pitch, the excitement is just as real. Lynch pointed to the statistical dominance of Wirtz's performances. 'The numbers are unbelievable… assists, goals, chance creation — he's good at absolutely everything in the final third.' There is still uncertainty around where Wirtz will line up under Slot. Lynch admitted, 'I haven't heard anything specifically on position yet,' though speculation around a number 10 role or even as a false nine remains strong. Advertisement What is certain is Wirtz's versatility and quality. As Lynch put it, 'He defends a little bit like an attacking midfielder rather than an out-and-out number 10.' With Liverpool having 'walked the league last season,' adding such a dynamic talent could widen the gap even further. 'If you're one of the rivals… you'd be seriously worried,' said Lynch. Final Word: A Statement of Intent 'This is not normally like Liverpool,' said Dave Davis during the discussion, and he's right. This signing is bolder, louder and utterly deliberate. It speaks of a club ready not just to maintain its position but to dominate. Liverpool have made their move. The Premier League has been warned.
