For most investors, how much a stock's price changes over time is important. Not only can it impact your investment portfolio, but it can also help you compare investment results across sectors and industries.

The fear of missing out, or FOMO, also plays a factor in investing, especially with particular tech giants, as well as 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. Over time, Palo Alto Networks has expanded its portfolio into multiple security platforms that cover network security, cloud security and security operations, and it also offers threat intelligence and advisory services through Unit 42.

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

Anyone can invest, but building a successful investment portfolio takes a combination of a few things: research, patience, and a little bit of risk. So, if you had invested in Palo Alto Networks a decade ago, you're probably feeling pretty good about your investment today.

According to our calculations, a $1000 investment made in August 2016 would be worth $15,702.94, or a gain of 1,470.29%, as of August 24, 2026, and this return excludes dividends but includes price increases.

The S&P 500 rose 251.49% and the price of gold increased 231.37% over the same time frame in comparison.

Analysts are forecasting more upside for PANW too.

Palo Alto Networks continues to benefit from higher cybersecurity priority as enterprises deploy AI and look to consolidate vendors onto fewer platforms. Platformization is translating into larger commitments, supported by expanding next-generation security ARR and RPO, and management guidance implies continued growth in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026. Momentum in Network Security, SASE and Prisma AIRS, along with early execution on the CyberArk and Chronosphere integrations, supports the long-term revenue mix shift toward recurring software and free cash flow. However, softening IT spending amid macroeconomic headwinds may hurt its near-term prospects. Intense competition and deal scrutiny could still slow bookings at times. Acquisition-related expenses due to larger acquired footprint adds integration risks and could dent margins.

The stock is up 10.52% over the past four weeks, and no earnings estimate has gone lower in the past two months, compared to 1 higher, for fiscal 2026. The consensus estimate has moved up as well.

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Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (PANW): Free Stock Analysis Report

This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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