Russia’s ongoing unjustified war is a heartbreaking display of brutality and a violation of the fundamental principle of freedom that we share with Ukraine. We remain steadfast in our commitment to support Ukraine by stopping all sales and shutting down cloud operations in Russia, fully implementing international sanctions, and donating both technology and humanitarian aid.
On March 2, we stopped all sales in Russia and then Belarus. We have immediately implemented all international sanctions without exception, and are in constant contact with our government counterparts to remain aligned with their strategies to end this war. We appreciate the resolve and intelligence with which governments have come together on coordinated sanctions and welcome the announcement of new international sanctions expected soon.
Beyond implementing sanctions and stopping all sales, we are actively shutting down our cloud operations in Russia. We have received questions about SAP’s ability to shut down all existing products for Russian customers. There are customers in Russia that have bought and deployed their SAP products on premise and run these products within their own internal IT departments. This means that regardless of any SAP decision not to provide support or engagement of any kind, these customers are still able to continue using these products independently of SAP.
To address the humanitarian and refugee needs on the ground, we are using our technology to help multi-national organizations across a range of aid efforts. One focus is ensuring aid groups and healthcare workers can get supplies. On March 9, we enabled suppliers on SAP Business Network to declare their readiness to provide humanitarian aid; some 1,500 have already done so. We’re also helping the Ukrainian government order supplies for hospitals so that they can get urgently needed equipment as quickly and easily as possible.
Technology is just one of the resources we’re offering. Total donations from SAP and our employees have surpassed €3 million and continue to grow. Over 4,000 employees have offered housing and other aid to refugees. We’re also providing SAP office space to store donations such as medicine and food.
We stand with the global community in its efforts to stop this unjust war in Ukraine and we remain committed to supporting efforts to restore peace.
Updated April 12: We’ve received some questions about our approach to shutting down our cloud operations in Russia. In providing cloud services, SAP legally acts as a data processor, which means that the customer data within our cloud services always belongs to the customer, never to SAP. This is true for both Russia-based businesses and for multi-national companies working within Russia. With our decision to shut down cloud operations in Russia, we are contractually obliged to provide all non-sanctioned customers legally-compliant options for how their data should be handled — these customers can choose to have their data deleted, sent to them or migrated to cloud operations located outside of Russia. Customers with whom business is prohibited by sanctions were not given these options.
