Yahoo Finance SAP's first female co-chief steps down as pandemic pushes company back to single CEO model
German software giant SAP (SAP) announced late on Monday that its co-chief executive Jennifer Morgan was leaving the company and Christian Klein, her co-CEO would carry on in the job.
Morgan made history in October 2019 when she became the first chief executive of SAP as well as the first woman to ever lead a company on the DAX, the blue-chip index of Germany’s 30 largest companies.
SAP gave the coronavirus pandemic as a reason for her departure, saying in a statement that the move was to ensure “strong unambiguous steering” and that “the current environment requires companies to take swift, determined action which is best supported by a very clear leadership structure.”
“The reason we decided to come back to a sole CEO model was because of the outbreak of the pandemic,“ Klein said in a call with reporters. There was no exact date to when SAP would have come back to a sole CEO model but in these turbulent times we thought now was the right time.”
The 48-year-old American will leave at the end of April. Morgan has been with the software company since 2004. She was president of the SAP’s Cloud Business Group and became an executive board member in 2017.
Her appointment to lead the company along with the 39-year-old Klein came after Bill McDermott, who has been SAP’s chief executive for 10 years, suddenly resigned, although his contract was not due to expire until 2021. McDermott has taken a new job as CEO of cloud computing company ServiceNow.
"It has been a great privilege to drive SAP's growth and innovation in so many areas and most recently as co-CEO," Morgan said in a statement.
