Goldman has raised its rating on Cloudflare (NET.US) to "Buy" and set a new target price of $140.
In a comprehensive investor report on U.S. cybersecurity stocks, Goldman raised its rating on Cloudflare (NET.US) to "buy" from "sell" with a new target price of $140.Analysts led by Gabriela Borges stated that Cloudflare has two catalysts in 2025, including "two years of development in sales and marketing productivity cycles to better address platform sales in enterprises, and Act III product's growing appeal to developer services as Cloudflare applies its core edge network architecture advantage (running software workloads on all commodity servers, across telco access points) to new AI inference use cases."Goldman found that the CIO views investment in the platform as a top priority in cybersecurity.At the same time, Goldman downgraded Check Point Software Technologies (CHKP.US) to "neutral" from "buy."Goldman believes 2025 will be a year of incremental investment for Check Point as the new CEO assesses growth areas and the company invests more in its new security access service edge product."Overall, we believe EPS growth will be under pressure in 2025, as the stock typically tracks EPS growth," Goldman noted. "We believe 2026 has the potential to become more positive if Check Point successfully converts incremental investments into incremental revenue growth, with revenue growth of more than 10% and EPS growth of more than 20% back in focus."Check Point last month named Nadav Zafrir as its new CEO. He was previously a co-founder and managing partner of Team8, a company-building venture capital group focused on cybersecurity, data and AI, fintech and digital health.