Cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks is expecting its sales over the next three years growing at a double-digit pace and shared an outlook with healthy cash flow, as said the company.
Palo Alto’s up-trending forecast came on the heels of better-than-expected profit and revenue that company had reported in fourth quarter results announced last week, largely because of stronger demand of its cloud security products.
The Santa Clara, California-based firm, which competes in a highly competitive market mostly dominated by traditional firewall provider Cisco Systems Inc, Juniper Networks Inc and Check Point Software Technologies, said that its cloud security tool Prisma Access keep gaining the popularity and that trend increased the company’s confidence that it could achieve a compounded annual growth rate of 20% for revenue and billings over the next three years.
The firm forecasted sales of about $5 billion for fiscal 2022, while four analysts on average was expecting the same of about $4.3 billion, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.
Free cash flow of a company is the amount of cash left over after payment of capital expenditures and operating expenses, and Palo Alto is in expectation of having a free cash flow of $4 billion in 2022, which is also up from $1.58 billion, according to an average estimate by two analysts on Refinitiv Eikon.
The company also came on acquiring an IoT security provider firm Zingbox in an all cash deal of worth $75 million, whereas earlier this year, it bought two Israel-based cybersecurity firms PureSec and Twistlock as well as a U.S.-Israeli information security firm Demisto Inc. Previously in October last year, Palo Alto bought Redlock, a U.S-based cloud security company.
In the fourth quarter, Palo Alto’s total revenue jumped by 22.4% to reach $805.8 million, a little up from analysts’ estimates of $802.4 million, while excluding items, its per share earnings of $1.47 also beat the analyst’s expectations of $1.42 per share.
