“Lesson learnt 🙂”
After spooking Wall Street for weeks with its plans to report earnings after Friday’s closing bell, Palo Alto Networks Inc.’s mysterious move turned out to be much ado about nothing.
Some analysts were fearing trouble at Palo Alto Networks
PANW,
+1.02%,
especially after fellow cybersecurity company Fortinet Inc.
FTNT,
-0.44%
delivered a downbeat report earlier in the cycle and Palo Alto teased that its own call would last about two hours. Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives didn’t mince words in his preview note, writing that the decision to post results late Friday was “one of the biggest PR disasters and black eyes we have seen in decades of covering tech.”
See also: Why is Palo Alto Networks reporting earnings Friday afternoon? The strange timing draws speculation.
Going back to 2018, only one member of the S&P 500 index
SPX
posted earnings on a Friday, according to Dow Jones Market Data. That was Nike Inc.
NKE,
-0.23%
in December 2020, and while the report from Nike brought good news, Wall Street was still fearful headed into Palo Alto Networks’ report given the unconventional scheduling.
But results turned out to be fine, as Palo Alto beat earnings expectations and largely topped estimates with its guidance.
Palo Alto Networks shares sunk about 18% between when the company announced its earnings date, toward the start of the month, and Friday’s close, before the release came out. That selloff came during a period when tech stocks in general were under pressure, though the Nasdaq 100 index
NDX
was down only about 6% in the period.
Shares of Palo Alto Networks rallied sharply after the latest results, however, up more than 11% in Friday’s extended session.
Palo Alto Networks Chief Executive Nikesh Arora suggested on the earnings call that he thought the company had been clear enough in its rationale for the Friday afternoon timing.
“We apologize to people who are inconvenienced,” he said at the top of his prepared remarks, according to a transcript provided by AlphaSense/Sentieo. “But as we had mentioned in our press release, we wanted to give ample time to analysts to have one-on-one calls with us over the weekend, and we have a sales conference that kicks off on Sunday. We want to make sure all of our information was disclosed out there.”
He added some more lighthearted remarks, including to say that the company “enjoyed the attention” and that analyst reports that speculated on the timing “made for some very interesting reading.” Arora said that analysts might tell future mentees about the unusual Friday event, which came out of the company’s “sort of misdirected sense of trying to get you guys to go do this over the weekend for us.”
Arora shared on X, the service formerly known as Twitter, that 5,500 people had dialed into the company’s call about two hours into it, whereas average attendance over the past five years was about 1,000.
But would the company do it all again? Presumably not, he suggested.
Wallace Witkowski contributed reporting.
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