Global cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks claims that the Microsoft Blue Screen incident has brought new impetus to platform development.
On August 19th local time, Palo Alto released its fourth quarter fiscal year 2024 results as of July 31st. The company's fourth quarter revenue increased by 12% year-on-year to $2.189 billion, slightly higher than market expectations of $2.16 billion; Net profit under Non GAAP criteria was $522 million, a year-on-year increase of 8%; Diluted earnings per share were $1.51, higher than market expectations of $1.41.
Throughout the fiscal year 2024, Palo Alto's revenue reached $8.028 billion, a year-on-year increase of 16.5%; Subscription based recurring revenue accounts for 53% of total revenue, and Palo Alto hopes to increase this proportion to 64% by fiscal year 2025.
Meanwhile, Palo Alto has provided higher than expected performance guidance, expecting revenue for the current quarter (i.e. the first quarter of fiscal year 2025) to reach between $2.1 billion and $2.13 billion, a year-on-year increase of over 12%, exceeding market expectations of $2.1 billion; It is expected that the earnings per share under Non GAAP will reach between $1.47 and $1.49, higher than the market expectation of $1.43.
For the fiscal year 2025, Palo Alto expects revenue to reach $9.1 billion to $9.15 billion, a year-on-year increase of over 13%; Under Non GAAP, earnings per share reached between $6.18 and $6.31, a year-on-year increase of over 9%. Palo Alto also announced that its board of directors has approved an additional $500 million for the repurchase of the company's stock, increasing the total authorized stock repurchase amount by the board to $1 billion.
Palo Alto Q4 Performance Summary. Source: Palo Alto Financial Report
On the 19th, the stock price of Palo Alto (Nasdaq: PANW) closed at $343.36 per share, up 2.77%, with a total market value of $111.2 billion. After the release of the financial report, the company's after hours stock price rose by over 5%. According to Wind data, the company's stock price has risen by over 16% since the beginning of this year.
Previously, the Microsoft blue screen outage caused by competitor CrowdStrike drew additional attention to Palo Alto's performance. On July 19th, many Microsoft users worldwide reported a "blue screen" malfunction on their company computers running Windows, which prevented them from starting up properly and lasted for several hours. According to Microsoft's follow-up report, this large-scale outage was caused by CrowdStrike upgrading its security software, affecting approximately 8.5 million devices worldwide that have installed Microsoft's Windows operating system, which is less than 1% of the total number of Windows system devices.
After the Blue Screen incident, the market began to speculate whether CrowdStrike's customers would turn to competitors including Palo Alto, or whether the incident would have a negative impact on the entire cybersecurity industry.
From the latest performance and outlook data of Palo Alto, it seems that the impact of the incident on the cybersecurity market is relatively limited. However, Palo Alto emphasized that the downtime incident has attracted much attention in the field of cybersecurity and brought new development opportunities for the company.
During the post earnings conference call, Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto, stated that the company is "very satisfied" with its performance in the previous quarter. After the recent large-scale interruption incident involving security software tools, some customers have begun to reassess their choices: "These customers have had conversations with us about the Extended Detection and Response Architecture (XDR) and Extended Security Intelligence and Automation Management Platform (XSIAM), as well as our industry-leading Cortex security platform. Based on our conversations with customers, we believe that the Cortex platform has the potential for further growth
In addition, Alola emphasized that the security software update method at Palo Alto is "completely different" from CrowdStrike: "Since the crash incident, our customer base has been contacting us to inquire about how Palo Alto deploys updates and how it differs from competitors." He pointed out that the company first deploys sample testing within 1% to 3% of the user base when releasing products to ensure there are no issues, and then releases content updates in stages.
On the other hand, CrowdStrike will release its latest financial report on August 28th local time. According to the latest analysis by cloud monitoring and insurance company Parametrix, the direct economic losses caused by the previous Microsoft Blue Screen incident to Fortune 500 companies are expected to exceed 5.4 billion US dollars, with the healthcare and banking industries being the hardest hit areas in this failure, and the aviation industry also suffering heavy losses.
Previously, CrowdStrike shareholders had filed a class action lawsuit in Austin Federal Court, Texas, accusing CrowdStrike of making significant false and misleading statements regarding its technology warranties. Delta Air Lines also announced on August 8th that it is filing a legal claim against CrowdStrike.