Palo Alto Rising In Pre-market On Upbeat Results, Outlook

Shares of cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (PANW) are rising more than 8% in pre-market on Friday after reporting better-than-expected first-quarter results. The company’s second-quarter as well full-year earnings outlook also came in above analysts’ view.

Palo Alto reported a profit of $20 million or $0.06 per share in the first quarter, compared with loss of $103.6 million or $0.35 per share in the same quarter a year ago.

Excluding one-time items, earnings were $266.4 million or $0.83 per share, that beat the average estimate of 33 analysts polled by Thomson-Reuters of $0.69 per share.

Quarterly revenue increased 25% year-on-year to $1.563 billion. The consensus estimate stands at $1.55 billion.

Looking forward to the second quarter, the company expects revenue in the range of $1.63 billion to $1.66 billion. Adjusted EPS for the quarter is expected between $0.76 and $0.78.

Analysts see earnings of $0.71 per share on revenue of $1.65 billion for the quarter.

For the full year, the company sees revenue in the range of $6.85 billion-$6.91 billion and adjusted earnings per share in the range of $3.37-$3.44.

The consensus estimate for revenue is at $6.87 billion and for earnings is at $3.17 per share.

Separately, Palo Alto announced its decision to acquire Cider Security, an application security and software supply chain security company for about $195 million to be paid in cash.

“The proposed acquisition supports Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud’s platform approach to securing the entire application security lifecycle from code to cloud,” the company said.

The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter.

On Thursday, PANW closed at $156.56, down $2.53 or 1.59%. It has traded in the range of $140.07-$213.63 in the last 1 year.

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