What if you bought SAP in 2000?
World · Germany. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play10.0× · S&P 500 same money: $4,626
$1,000 in SAP at the start of 2000 would be worth about $10,000 today — 10.0 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
SAP was founded in 1972 by five former IBM engineers in Germany and became the world's largest maker of enterprise resource planning software, the system that runs finances, procurement and supply chains for many of the world's biggest companies. Once installed, it is extraordinarily painful to replace, which gives SAP remarkable pricing power and long customer relationships.
The shares rose in the 1990s dot-com boom, slumped afterwards and drifted through the 2000s. SAP was slow to move to the cloud, and investors doubted it could compete with newer rivals like Salesforce and Workday. In October 2020 it cut its forecasts and delayed profit targets to accelerate the cloud transition, and the shares fell by around a fifth in a single day. That painful pivot, including the RISE with SAP programme and the push to move customers to S/4HANA, eventually paid off: cloud revenue grew rapidly and by 2025 SAP had overtaken Novo Nordisk as the most valuable company in Europe. From 2000, the shares rose roughly tenfold.
The lesson: Switching costs are among the most durable moats, giving incumbents time to fix strategic mistakes that would destroy companies with less loyal customers.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | $25.00 | $10,000 | $4,626 | 10.0× |
| 2003 | $20.00 | $12,500 | $7,727 | 12.5× |
| 2005 | $35.00 | $7,143 | $5,763 | 7.1× |
| 2007 | $40.00 | $6,250 | $4,789 | 6.2× |
| 2008 | $35.00 | $7,143 | $4,626 | 7.1× |
| 2010 | $33.00 | $7,576 | $6,071 | 7.6× |
| 2012 | $41.00 | $6,098 | $5,312 | 6.1× |
| 2015 | $58.00 | $4,310 | $3,301 | 4.3× |
| 2018 | $93.00 | $2,688 | $2,519 | 2.7× |
| 2020 | $120 | $2,083 | $2,092 | 2.1× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2003, turning $1,000 into $12,500. The S&P 500 from that same year: $7,727.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. SAP is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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