Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
Check Point sells software and hardware that stop hackers and viruses from breaking into computers and networks.
Check Point is a cybersecurity company. It sells the digital equivalent of locks, alarms, and guards for computer networks. Its customers are mostly businesses, governments, and large organizations—not regular people. When a bank, a hospital, or a government agency wants to keep hackers out of its systems, it can buy Check Point's products. The company makes money mainly by selling subscriptions to its security software, plus some hardware appliances and support contracts. Think of it as a security firm for buildings, except the buildings are digital and the intruders are invisible.
The business comes in a few connected pieces. The biggest is network security, which means firewalls—software or boxes that sit between a company's internal network and the open internet and decide what traffic to let through. Check Point also sells cloud security, which protects data and apps running on services like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, and "endpoint" security, which guards individual laptops and phones. A growing piece is "email and collaboration security," protecting tools like Microsoft 365 from phishing and malicious links. Subscriptions and support make up the large majority of revenue, which is the good kind of revenue because it repeats every year. In its most recent year, Check Point brought in roughly $2.5 billion in revenue, growing slowly in the low single digits. It is a very profitable company, with fat margins, because once the software is built, adding another customer costs little.
Check Point was founded in 1993 by Gil Shwed, who is still involved, and it helped invent the modern corporate firewall. For years it was the clear leader, but rivals like Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet have grown faster and taken share. Check Point's response has been to buy smaller security companies and push into cloud and "zero trust" products. It throws off a lot of cash, and it uses that cash to buy back its own stock and pay a dividend—returning money to shareholders rather than hoarding it. The stock is watched closely because it is a steady, cash-rich business in a field that never stops being scary for its customers. That fear, sadly for the world and luckily for Check Point, is a durable business model.
Saved answer · last researched 11 Oct 2026