Business Letter to the Shareholders Dear Shareholders,
Customers, Partners, and Colleagues,
2006 was an important year for SAP. We achieved a number of significant milestones towards our long-term growth targets for 2010. We proved our ability to drive new innovation through the expansion of our product portfolio and through the global availability of the first business process platform. A 10% increase in revenues and a 27% increase in adjusted net income demonstrate that SAP continues to be a growth company that consistently delivers outstanding results.
We set ambitious targets for 2006 and were not able to meet all of them. We achieved 12% software revenue growth in constant currencies. Though short of our 15% target, this was an excellent result in comparison with our market peers. We increased our market share in all regions and against our main competitors.
In 2007, we will continue our strategy of organic
growth based on our own innovation and co-innovation
with customers and partners. As our customers’ ability to
innovate becomes increasingly dependent on IT, our ability
to innovate faster than our competitors will become ever
more important, and we have proved that an organic growth
strategy is the best way to sustain our first-mover advantage.
We will successfully deliver on the product road map
we announced three years ago and we will introduce a new
software category that represents a radical innovation in
both product and business models in our industry.