Cybersecurity provider Palo Alto Networks (NASDAQ:PANW) will be announcing earnings results tomorrow afternoon. Here’s what investors should know.
Palo Alto Networks beat analysts’ revenue expectations by 0.9% last quarter, reporting revenues of $2.14 billion, up 13.9% year on year. It was a strong quarter for the company, with EPS guidance for next quarter exceeding analysts’ expectations and an impressive beat of analysts’ EBITDA estimates.
Is Palo Alto Networks a buy or sell going into earnings? Read our full analysis here, it’s free.
This quarter, analysts are expecting Palo Alto Networks’s revenue to grow 13.3% year on year to $2.24 billion, slowing from the 19.3% increase it recorded in the same quarter last year. Adjusted earnings are expected to come in at $0.78 per share.
Analysts covering the company have generally reconfirmed their estimates over the last 30 days, suggesting they anticipate the business to stay the course heading into earnings. Palo Alto Networks has missed Wall Street’s revenue estimates three times over the last two years.
Looking at Palo Alto Networks’s peers in the cybersecurity segment, some have already reported their Q4 results, giving us a hint as to what we can expect. Qualys delivered year-on-year revenue growth of 10.1%, beating analysts’ expectations by 1.9%, and Varonis reported revenues up 2.9%, falling short of estimates by 4.2%. Qualys traded down 3.8% following the results while Varonis was also down 7.5%.
Read our full analysis of Qualys’s results here and Varonis’s results here.
There has been positive sentiment among investors in the cybersecurity segment, with share prices up 9.1% on average over the last month. Palo Alto Networks is up 14.5% during the same time and is heading into earnings with an average analyst price target of $203.84 (compared to the current share price of $195.45).
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