Check Point Buys Some Investor Love

4 Recommendations

Check Point Software's (Nasdaq: CHKP) CEO and founder, Gil Shwed, is a security pioneer who started developing firewall technologies back in the early 1990s. Nowadays, the company has all of the Fortune 100 companies as customers. But to push its growth even further, it's been adding heft to its product line and is now getting some traction.

Yesterday's second-quarter results showed that revenues increased 27% to $176.2 million. Check Point reported 13 deals between $500,000 and $1 million and 11 transactions in excess of $1 million for the period.

Net income, meanwhile, increased by 5% to $69.5 million, or $0.31 per share. Cash flow from operations was a healthy $81.5 million, and the company now has about $1.1 billion in the bank.

Check Point is aggressively building an all-in-one security offering so as to compete against gorillas such as EMC (NYSE: EMC), Symantec (Nasdaq: SYMC), and IBM (NYSE: IBM). To pull off this feat, management has completed a variety of major acquisitions over the past year. For example, its deal for NFR has added real-time network protection capabilities, and the acquisition of Protect Data allows for security in the quickly growing mobile space.

Check Point has also been leveraging its large research-and-development resources to launch new products. Q2 brought with it a variety of major product launches, and it looks as though we'll see more throughout the rest of the year.

While the security business is already robust, Check Point has made the necessary investments to keep up with its rivals. With many more products, it now has an opportunity to aggressively cross-sell across its thousands of accounts.

So far this year, Check Point's stock price has been mostly static. But on news of the Q2 earnings, it shot up 7%. And in light of the momentum in the business, it appears that shareholders can expect more good news going forward.

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Fool contributor Tom Taulli, author of The Complete M&A Handbook, does not own shares of companies mentioned in this article. He is ranked 2,144 out of more than 60,000 participants in Motley Fool CAPS.

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Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.

CHKP Up! $19.65 +1.16 (+6.27%) 4:00 PM
CAPS Rating:
186 Outperforms
14 Underperforms
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