SAP eyes share buybacks while ruling out new mega-deals

WALLDORF (Reuters) - SAP will consider initiating share buybacks but plans to keep a lid on big acquisition deals, its chief executive said on Tuesday, saying that the German software company was confident that currently available merger targets were overpriced.

"Most of what you are going to see from us are tuck-ins," Chief Executive Bill McDermott told Reuters, referring to smaller, typically technology-focused deals. "And you shouldn't expect any big acquisitions," he said, reiterating previous statements.

However, when asked whether SAP was prepared to do multi-billion deals and not just $100 million technology acquisitions to fill any holes in its cloud-based services offerings, McDermott said: "I think that certainly that could be the case".

"That would be what I would call a pretty serious tuck-in but it certainly is not a mega-deal either," he said in defining the outer boundary of what SAP would consider "big" deals.

Earlier, the company reported in-line fourth quarter results while nudging up its financial outlook for 2017 and its ambitions for four years out in 2020. It said free cash flow rose to 3.63 billion euros last year, up 21 percent over 2015.

Besides paying dividends, boosting spending on in-house innovation, he said the company was weighing when it might return some of its free cash to shareholders in the form of share buybacks.

"Certainly in the second half of the year, that would be a possibility," McDermott said of share buybacks and allowed such a plan could even come in the first half of 2017. "We could do it earlier because we have such confidence in the share price".

SAP's share price currently hovers near all-time highs, making it Europe's most valuable technology stock.

(Reporting by Eric Auchard, Harro ten Wolde and Ilona Wissenbach; Editing by Maria Sheahan)