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

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How much a stock's price changes over time is important for most investors, since price performance can both impact your investment portfolio and help you compare investment results across sectors and industries.

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 Fortinet (FTNT - Free Report) ten years ago? It may not have been easy to hold on to FTNT for all that time, but if you did, how much would your investment be worth today?

Fortinet's Business In-Depth

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

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, Fortinet, Inc. is a provider of network security appliances and Unified Threat Management (UTM) network security solutions to enterprises, service providers and government entities worldwide.

Its solutions are designed to integrate multiple levels of security protection, including firewall, virtual private networking (VPN), antivirus, intrusion prevention (IP), web filtering, anti-spam and wide area network (WAN) acceleration.

Through its products and subscription services, the company 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 to defend against multiple categories of IT security attacks without impacting network performance.

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

Its flagship UTM solution consists of the FortiGate appliance product line and FortiGuard security subscription services.

Its products and services are sold through a network of more than 20,000 channel partners worldwide, including distributors, resellers, value-added resellers and managed service providers. The company caters to more than 450,000 customers worldwide that includes most of the Fortune 100 companies.

The company derives a significant portion of total sales from the top 10 biggest distributors, of which Exclusive Networks Group has the highest share and accounted for 31% of 2021 total revenues followed by Ingram Micro’s 12%.

Fortinet reported revenues of  $4.42 billion in 2022, which increased 32.2% from 2021. Product revenue was $1.78 billion, up 41.9% while Service revenue of $2.64 billion improved 26.3% year over year in 2022.

The company faces significant competition with Palo Alto Networks, CyberArk, Qualys and Cisco in the network security as well as cloud security space.

Bottom Line

Putting together a successful investment portfolio takes a combination of research, patience, and a little bit of risk. For Fortinet, if you bought shares a decade ago, you're likely feeling really good about your investment today.

A $1000 investment made in December 2013 would be worth $14,886.62, or a gain of 1,388.66%, as of December 6, 2023, according to our calculations. This return excludes dividends but includes price appreciation.

The S&P 500 rose 155.86% and the price of gold increased 57.87% over the same time frame in comparison.

Going forward, analysts are expecting more upside for FTNT. Fortinet is benefiting from rising demand from small enterprise customers and growth in the company's security subscriptions. The company is also gaining from the robust growth in Fortinet Security Fabric, cloud and Software-defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) offerings. Continued deal wins, especially those of high value, are a key driver. Higher IT spending on cybersecurity is further expected to aid Fortinet in growing faster than the security market. We expect 2023 net sales to increase 19.7% from 2022. The focus on enhancing its unified threat management (UTM) portfolio through product development and acquisitions is a tailwind for the company. However, intensifying competition because of increasing consolidation in the security industry poses concerns. Increased hiring and mergers & acquisitions spends remain overhangs on margin. The stock is up 6.06% over the past four weeks, and 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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