Cybersecurity provider Palo Alto Networks (NASDAQ: PANW) will be reporting results tomorrow after market hours. Here’s what investors should know.
Palo Alto Networks beat analysts’ revenue expectations by 0.8% last quarter, reporting revenues of $2.26 billion, up 14.3% year on year. It was a mixed quarter for the company, with an impressive beat of analysts’ EBITDA estimates but a miss of analysts’ billings 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 14.7% year on year to $2.28 billion, in line with the 15.3% increase it recorded in the same quarter last year. Adjusted earnings are expected to come in at $0.77 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 twice over the last two years.
Looking at Palo Alto Networks’s peers in the cybersecurity segment, some have already reported their Q1 results, giving us a hint as to what we can expect. Qualys delivered year-on-year revenue growth of 9.7%, beating analysts’ expectations by 1.8%, and Tenable reported revenues up 10.7%, topping estimates by 2.4%. Qualys’s stock price was unchanged after the resultswhile Tenable was down 9.3%.
Read our full analysis of Qualys’s results here and Tenable’s results here.
There has been positive sentiment among investors in the cybersecurity segment, with share prices up 22.9% on average over the last month. Palo Alto Networks is up 19.2% during the same time and is heading into earnings with an average analyst price target of $212.00 (compared to the current share price of $190.75).
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