5 Analysts Discuss Cybersecurity Stock Fortinet After a Very Positive Analyst Day
2022.05.11 17:12
5 Analysts Discuss Cybersecurity Fortinet (FTNT) Stock After a Very Positive Analyst Day
Fortinet (NASDAQ:FTNT) soared 6.76% yesterday as investors took many positives from the 2022 Analyst Day.
The company outlined plans to target $10 billion in billings and $8 billion in revenue by 2025, better than the consensus.
Here are 5 analysts discussing Fortinet stock, including Daiwa’s Stephen Bersey who upgraded shares to Buy after a strong quarter and market pullback.
KeyBanc’s Michael Turits (Overweight, PT $353): “FTNT outlined its opportunities around the convergence of networking and security and the consolidation of security spending around a smaller number of vendors. While largely at a high level, we believe messaging addressed investor interest in Fortinet’s opportunity beyond its core platform in network security to areas including Zero Trust and Cloud Security.”
Daiwa’s Bersey (Buy, PT $307 from $377): “A key part of our investment thesis is the company’s expansion opportunity within the enterprise market, and we were impressed with 1Q’22’s enterprise results, which followed strong 4Q’21 enterprise performance. Overall, we think that the company once again did a good job managing its supply chain and that it executed well in 1Q’22, particularly in the high-end enterprise market… We think that the recent market rerating for technology stocks may be overdone. And given the upside potential with our new target price, we are upgrading our rating on FTNT to 1/Buy from 2/Outperform.”
Morgan Stanley’s Hamza Fodderwala (Equal Weight, PT $330): “Given that we’re likely at or near cyclical peak for appliance demand and the ongoing debate around magnitude of early ordering/pull fwd, we look to garner more confidence on the durability of 20%+ topline longer term (especially as overall macro slows) before getting more positive on the stock.”
Citi’s Fatima Boolani (Buy, PT $405): “With reinforced optimism on FTNT’s multi-vector GARP story, we walk away more bullish post analyst day… The combination of sustainable positive estimate revisions & latent near-term beat-and-raise potential (owed to a large and building backlog in a tough supply chain backdrop) against what we’d cite as consistently strong sales execution and sales/manufacturing ops is not only compelling at 8x EV/S & 21x EV/FCF CY23E, but too cheap at 5x,12x on CY25 CitiE for a mid-20%s topline and FCF growth compounder, creating grounds for defensible multiple expansion.”
BTIG’s Gray Powell (Buy, $401): “We thought commentary on the potential for services revenue to accelerate in coming quarters and insights on Fabric and Cloud product components were positive. And lastly, we see ZTNA as a potential incremental growth driver for FTNT over the next few years. All in, we came away from the event with a great degree of confidence in the company’s long term growth profile.”
By Senad Karaahmetovic
