Investment in Cybersecurity Companies in Times of Political and Economic Instability

Abstract

The socio-economic development that has taken place in recent years takes into account cybersecurity issues. Cybersecurity has many different dimensions, including the economic dimension. The Russian-Ukrainian conflict has shown that modern war is not only conventional, but also cybernetic. Earlier, the massive shift to remote communication systems forced by COVID also increased the demand for cybersecurity. This means that cybersecurity com- panies receive new orders, which can have a positive impact on their financial results. In the opinion of many experts, investing in such companies could be a good business. The research conducted in this article focuses on testing assumptions related to the rec- ognition of investments in technology companies as prospective investments. Therefore, this study examines the impact of Russia- Ukraine war (from February 2022 to December 2024) and the COVID pandemic (from March 2020 to February 2022) on the valuation of cybersecurity companies. The period from January 2015 to February 2020 was used as the comparative period. The research material consists of companies and stock indices from the American and Polish markets. The results of the research are inconclusive. In fact, there are some examples of companies that took advantage of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict to achieve above-average returns. Such a business is risky, which is why these companies are achiev- ing above-average returns with increased shares price volatility. However, it turns out that automatically assigning a company to the cyber or IT category does not mean that it will be a good invest- ment in times of war or pandemic.