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) 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 2025, the company reported total revenues of $9.2 billion, which grew 15% year over year.
Palo Alto’s fiscal 2025 revenues from its products increased 12.4% year over year to $1.82 billion. Revenues from subscriptions and support grew 15.5% to $7.42 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, Check Point, Fortinet, CrowdStrike, 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.
A $1000 investment made in October 2015 would be worth $8,049.56, or a gain of 704.96%, as of October 22, 2025, according to our calculations. This return excludes dividends but includes price appreciation.
The S&P 500 rose 233.61% and the price of gold increased 237.76% over the same time frame in comparison.
Going forward, analysts are expecting more upside for PANW.
Palo Alto has been benefiting from continuous deal wins and the increasing adoption of its next-generation security platforms, which are attributable to the rise of the hybrid work trend 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 may 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.
Over the past four weeks, shares have rallied 5.49%, and there have been 1 higher earnings estimate revisions in the past two months for fiscal 2025 compared to none lower. The consensus estimate has moved up as well.
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Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (PANW): Free Stock Analysis ReportThis article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).
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