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Here's How Much You'd Have If You Invested $1000 in Palo Alto Networks a Decade Ago

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How much a stock's price changes over time is a significant driver for most investors. Not only can price performance impact your portfolio, but it can help you compare investment results across sectors and industries as well.

The fear of missing out, or FOMO, also plays a factor in investing, especially with particular tech giants, as well as popular consumer-facing stocks.

What if you'd invested in Palo Alto Networks (PANW - Free Report) ten years ago? It may not have been easy to hold on to PANW for all that time, but if you did, how much would your investment be worth today?

Palo Alto Networks' Business In-Depth

With that in mind, let's take a look at Palo Alto Networks' main business drivers.

Santa Clara, CA-based Palo Alto Networks, Inc. offers network security solutions to enterprises, service providers and government entities worldwide.

The company's next generation firewall products deliver natively integrated application, user, and content visibility and control through its operating system, hardware and software architecture. It serves the enterprise network security market, which includes Firewall, Unified Threat Management (UTM), Web Gateway, Intrusion Detection and Prevention, and Virtual Private Network technologies.

Through its products and subscription services, Palo Alto provides integrated protection against dynamic security threats while simplifying the IT security infrastructure. Its solutions incorporate application-specific integrated circuits, hardware architecture, operating system, and associated security and networking functions.

The company’s network security gateways protect customer data, reduce security complexities and lower total cost of ownership. Customers can implement their security policies on traffic between internal networks and the Internet, as well as between internal and private networks shared with partners.

The company has a single operating segment. However, the company announces its revenues from products and services separately. For fiscal 2023, the company reported total revenues of $6.89 billion, which grew 25.3% year over year.

Palo Alto’s fiscal 2023 revenues from its products increased 15.8% year over year to $1.58 billion. Revenues from subscriptions and support grew 28.4% to $5.31 billion.

Further, Palo Alto operates across different geographic regions, including the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) and the Asia-Pacific and Japan (APAC).

The company faces competition from large companies like Cisco and Juniper, independent security vendors such as Symantec, Check Point, Fortinet, FireEye and several other small companies.

Bottom Line

While anyone can invest, building a lucrative investment portfolio takes research, patience, and a little bit of risk. If you had invested in Palo Alto Networks ten years ago, you're probably feeling pretty good about your investment today.

According to our calculations, a $1000 investment made in October 2013 would be worth $17,067.89, or a gain of 1,606.79%, as of October 12, 2023, and this return excludes dividends but includes price increases.

Compare this to the S&P 500's rally of 156.98% and gold's return of 37.81% over the same time frame.

Going forward, analysts are expecting more upside for PANW.

Palo Alto has been benefiting from continuous deal wins and increasing adoption of the company’s next-generation security platforms, attributable to the rise in hybrid work environment and heightened need for stronger security. The company’s back-to-back strong quarterly performances reflect its sustained focus on product innovation, a shift in its business model to subscription-based services, platform integration and continued investments in the go-to-market strategy. Our estimates suggest that Palo Alto’s revenues will grow at a CAGR of 17.5% through fiscal 2024-2026. Shares of the company have outperformed the industry over the past year. Nonetheless, Forex headwinds and higher marketing and sales expenses are likely to continue hurting its profitability. Moreover, high acquisition related expenses are denting the margins.

The stock has jumped 5.25% over the past four weeks. Additionally, no earnings estimate has gone lower in the past two months, compared to 16 higher, for fiscal 2023; the consensus estimate has moved up as well.

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