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If You Invested $1000 in Palo Alto Networks 10 Years Ago, This Is How Much You'd Have Now

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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.

Another factor that can influence investors is FOMO, or the fear of missing out, especially with tech giants and 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 2024, the company reported total revenues of $8.03 billion, which grew 16.5% year over year.

Palo Alto’s fiscal 2024 revenues from its products increased 1.6% year over year to $1.6 billion. Revenues from subscriptions and support grew 20.9% to $6.42 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 August 2014 would be worth $12,706.18, or a 1,170.62% gain, as of August 22, 2024. Investors should keep in mind that this return excludes dividends but includes price appreciation.

In comparison, the S&P 500 gained 182.12% and the price of gold went up 88.92% over the same time frame.

Analysts are forecasting more upside for PANW too.

Palo Alto has been benefiting from continuous deal wins and the increasing adoption of its next-generation security platforms, attributable to the rise in the hybrid work environment and the heightened need for stronger security. PANW’s strong back-to-back 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. The normalization of the supply chain is also aiding growth across the Products, Services and Subscription segments. However, softening IT spending amid macroeconomic headwinds might hurt its near-term prospects. Forex headwinds and higher marketing and sales expenses are likely to continue hurting its profitability. Also, high acquisition-related expenses are denting margins.

The stock is up 10.95% over the past four weeks, and no earnings estimate has gone lower in the past two months, compared to 2 higher, for fiscal 2024. The consensus estimate has moved up as well.

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