Now let’s review the 2023 annual performance. So our revenues, as mentioned before, grew by 4% to $2,415 million. Our gross profit increased from — increased to $2,154 million, representing a gross margin of 89%. This is a result of significant improvement during the year in the supply chain environment, which is much better than what we’ve seen last year, in 2022. Our operating expenses increased by 7% to $1,075 million. The increase was mainly as a result of our continued investment in our workforce, cloud infrastructure, marketing, travel costs and of course, the recent acquisition that we have — that we completed in September and October this year. Our non-GAAP operating income continued to be strong at $1,079 million, a 45% operating margin similar to what we’ve seen in 2022.
Looking into next year and our operating margin, we need to take into account the recent acquisition that we completed in December and October that will have a headwind of approximately 2 points to operating margin 2024. So on the other hand, we do see a tailwind of approximately between 0.5 point to 1 point related to stronger dollar and weaker shekel that are going to benefit us next in 2024. So as for the financial income this year, our financial income this year reached $77 million as we keep investing higher interest rates over time. As for 2024, we are expecting to see incremental financial income every quarter of approximately $1 million. As for the tax expenses in 2023, they amounted to $159 million. And our non-GAAP tax rate as you see was around 14%, similar to what we did — we saw in 2022.
As for 2024 tax expense, we are expecting to be around the same level of 14% effective tax rate — non-GAAP effective tax rate in each quarter and also annually. Our non-GAAP net income increased to $997 million or $8.42 per diluted share, posing the top end of projections by — of the original projection by $0.02 and representing a growth of 14% year-over-year. Our GAAP net income was $840 million or $7.10 per diluted share, 13% growth year-over-year. As for the number of shares for 2024, we expect the average diluted share to be somewhere around 130 million shares, starting in 160 million in the end of 2023 and going down by the year-end to somewhere around 111 million. We expect to see a decrease of approximately 1.3 million shares every quarter as a result of our expected buyback.
And we need to take into account also the higher stock price that means that, again, we’re going to keep our buyback in the same — in the approximately same dollar amounts, but it means that we’re going to have — we’re going to buy less shares if the stock price will stay in these levels. As for the operating cash flow for the entire year, it was strong with $1,035 billion of operating cash flow. In 2023, the operating cash flow include also $25 million related to our acquisitions upon the old facility to our acquisition and another $39 million of cost related to our hedging activity. As part of our buyback program, we purchased during the year almost 10 million, 9.9 million shares for $1.3 billion, at an average price of $131 per share. To summarize our results, we had strong results.
Revenues for the quarter was above the midpoint and EPS exceeded our projections, acceleration in quarterly and annual subscription revenues, strong performance that’s driven the total performance of our Infinity and Harmony E-mail. We did see a very — real turnaround — a positive turnaround in our business environment during Q4, with double-digit growth in new business annualized booking and strong profitability. A 47% operating margin in Q4 and 14% EPS growth for the full year of 2023. And now I’ll turn the call over to Gil.
Gil Shwed : Thank you very much, Roei, and thank you, everyone, again, for joining me. Let me give you a slightly discussion of what we’ve achieved and mainly what’s our strategy moving forward and the differentiator of Check Point. So just to recap some of the points we’ve talked about. I think, overall, we had great results in the fourth quarter, exceeded EPS, did the 15% growth in subscription, double-digit growth in revenues in Americas. And I think — overall, I think for the year, I’m very proud that we had a very strong execution. We started here, I just want to be clear. It sounds like everything was amazing. But now we started the year. We actually ended 2022 with what we think was a very tough economy when customers held back on projects, postponed investments and actually the level of new business was going down.
It lasted for four quarters, from Q4 2022 to Q3 2023. And I think last quarter, we told you that we are seeing the signs of a slight turnaround. I don’t know how much of that turnaround is a result of the economy and how much of it is the result of the great execution of the Check Point team, with double customer engagement, which leads to an increased pipeline in all geos. And I’m very glad to say that in the fourth quarter, we’ve seen double-digit growth in our new business — in our internal measures. I think Roei showed you the slides. I will have it again at the end. I think that’s — for me that’s a very strong indicator of the change that’s happened. And I truly hope that this change will continue in 2024, and that we’ll get a tailwind, not headwind, from the economy.
But let’s speak a little bit about some of the wins. We talked about the Infinity platform and its importance. We have hundreds of customers now on Infinity. These are generally customers with high volume of business with us. They take our platform. They use it on multiple layers of security. And you can see here some of the names — company, I mean, like the best names and the best brands in the world, companies like FedEx, Benetton, Bayer, Pirelli. And again, you can see here that we have it on almost every industry and different parts of the world. Very proud of that continuous achievement that continued throughout the year and throughout Q4. I think also in terms of our recognition in the industry, you can see here industry analysts’ leadership.
