On this page of StockholderLetter.com we present the latest annual shareholder letter from F5, INC. — ticker symbol FFIV. Reading current and past FFIV letters to shareholders can bring important insights into the investment thesis.

 •  1/26/2026 Letter Continued (Full PDF)
 •  1/25/2023 FFIV Stockholder Letter
 •  1/26/2024 FFIV Stockholder Letter
 •  1/27/2025 FFIV Stockholder Letter
 •  More "Information Technology Services" Category Stockholder Letters
 •  FFIV Benford's Law Stock Score = 93

FFIV Shareholder/Stockholder Letter Transcript:

Annual Report
2025

Fran  ois Locoh-Donou
President, CEO, and Director, F5, Inc.
TO OUR SHAREHOLDERS, CUSTOMERS, AND PARTNERS:
2025 proved to be a year of tremendous change and opportunity in a world grappling with persistent challenges
including global macroeconomic uncertainties and an escalation in cybersecurity risks. Against this backdrop,
technology remained a cornerstone for tackling these disruptions, and F5 played a pivotal role by delivering
advanced application delivery and security solutions that enabled our customers to navigate escalating
cybersecurity risks, optimize their digital infrastructures, and drive meaningful business outcomes.
Every second of every day, F5 helps millions of people bank, shop, communicate, and manage their lives securely
and reliably. Behind their experiences is F5. Our technology ensures seamless performance and safeguards
personal data. We believe that technology, when designed with purpose, has the power to enhance lives and
build trust. This is our mission: to help each other thrive and build a better digital world.
Today our customers   the largest enterprises, service providers, and government agencies across the globe   
face the rapid expansion of applications critical to business operations, the increasing breadth of services
needed to secure and optimize those applications, and the rising challenges of adopting and managing hybrid
multicloud environments. At the same time, escalating cybersecurity threats and the transformative rise of AI are
compounding operational complexity and introducing new layers of security and compliance risk. Our 30 years
of deep expertise at the heart of application delivery and security gives us unique insights into an era of rapid
technological change. F5 is more than a navigational partner in complexity   we turn technological challenges
into opportunity, enabling our customers to thrive in today   s hybrid multicloud world, while preparing confidently
for an AI-driven future.
We are incredibly proud to have delivered record fiscal year 2025 financial performance driven by our
alignment with meaningful secular trends including hybrid multicloud adoption, data center reinvestment,
and AI. We delivered 10% revenue growth, surpassing $3 billion in revenue for the first time in our history.
Product revenue grew 19%, driven by 31% growth in systems revenue and 9% in software revenue.
Our strong revenue performance and disciplined operations drove even stronger profitability growth. GAAP
net income reached $692 million, or $11.80 earnings per share, while non-GAAP net income hit $928 million,
or $15.81 per share, an 18% increase from fiscal year 2024.1
1 Fiscal year 2025 non-GAAP net income and net income per share excludes $231 million in stock-based compensation, $41 million in
amortization and impairment of purchased intangible assets, $25 million in restructuring charges, $12 million in acquisition-related charges,
$8 million in facility-exit costs, and $3 million in cyber incident costs.

We also delivered record cash flow from operations of $950 million, up 20% from $792 million in fiscal year 2024.
Furthermore, we returned 55% of our annual free cash flow to shareholders via share repurchases, surpassing our
50% minimum pledge.
Our fiscal year 2025 results demonstrate the power of F5   s hybrid multicloud approach, our leading role in the
market, and the promise of our newly launched Application Delivery and Security Platform. They also strengthen
our confidence in our vision and roadmap for the future.
We are executing on our vision and roadmap
Since I joined F5 eight years ago, we have expanded our solutions portfolio to target the growing complexity
our customers face. By enabling customers to deploy industry leading application delivery and security across
hardware, software, and SaaS environments, F5 empowers organizations to tackle the challenges of hybrid
multicloud while also strengthening security, streamlining operations, and lowering costs.
Our SaaS offerings are among the newest in our portfolio, and we made notable progress in our SaaS journey
during the year. Our F5 Distributed Cloud Services reached 26% penetration among our top customers, up from
17% last year, surpassing our internal targets, and demonstrating the increasing importance of SaaS deployment
models for our customers.
Further, we are driving innovation by unifying our solutions to deliver unprecedented visibility, manageability,
and automation. This vision reached a milestone in fiscal year 2025 with the launch of the F5 Application Delivery
and Security Platform (ADSP). The industry has platforms for endpoints, network access, and for cloud workloads,
but the F5 ADSP is the first platform to unite high-performance traffic management with advanced application
and API security across hybrid and multicloud environments, simplifying complexity at scale. Unlike fragmented
point solutions, the F5 ADSP integrates security, scalability, and operational efficiency while unlocking valuable
operational capabilities, or XOps capabilities, like policy management, analytics, and automation. By the end of
fiscal year 2025, nearly 900 customers were leveraging F5   s XOps capabilities, up from just 20 in 2024, a clear
reflection of our progress and the platform   s potential.
In fiscal year 2025, we began to define what leadership in AI-centric application delivery and security looks like.
From enabling data delivery for AI modeling and inferencing at scale, to delivering security for AI models and
workloads, and providing unparalleled traffic management for AI factories, F5 is positioning itself as an enabler
of AI   s most exciting possibilities. With more than 30 customers already deploying AI use cases powered by F5,
we believe this is just the beginning of what we can achieve together.
F5 is creating a global team that is both human-first and high-performance
We believe a strong company culture ultimately underpins our ability to perform for customers, partners, and
shareholders. F5   s commitment to its employees is to be a human-first and high-performing team equipped with
the tools and expertise to deliver extraordinary impact. We are delivering against this commitment through our
culture and engagement, our investment in employees    growth and development, our focus on belonging and
inclusion, and our compensation, benefits, and wellbeing offerings.

Our BeF5 and LeadF5 behaviors are key to executing our strategy and are pivotal to creating and sustaining
our strong company culture.
We measure the success of and identify areas of improvement for our culture through global employee
experience and sentiment surveys at least once each year. As of March 2025, our employees reported high
satisfaction with F5   s culture in several key areas:
    85% of employees favorably rate    I am proud to work for F5.   
    90% of employees favorably rate    I trust my manager.   
    91% of employees favorably rate    F5 shows a commitment to ethical business decisions and conduct.   
One survey measure that we track closely as a gauge of the strength of our culture is our employees    response to
the statement    I feel a sense of belonging at F5.    I am proud to report that 80% of employees rated this statement
favorably in March, up from 73% a year prior. This improvement reflects our ongoing efforts to foster a culture that
is critical to our employees    and our company   s performance.
F5 also remains steadfast in its commitment to create an inclusive workplace. We believe our differences, when
embraced with humility and respect, drive smarter decisions, increased innovation, stronger performance, and a
culture where everyone can be themselves and reach their full potential. The most critical drivers of our inclusion
efforts year after year are represented in our seven Employee Inclusion Groups (   EIGs   ). Since our first EIG was
established in 2013, these global communities represent a space for all F5ers to collaborate, share experiences,
and learn.
Company and governance principles are integrated into our business foundation
Our 30-year history reflects a belief that has guided every decision we have made: our work is not measured
solely by what we achieve, but by the integrity with which we achieve it. As stewards of a better digital world,
our Company and Governance programs are constant reminders not only of the trust others place in F5 but of our
responsibility to create a more resilient, sustainable future for all. Whether reducing our emissions, empowering
our communities, or strengthening governance for a rapidly evolving world, we remain anchored by a commitment
that resonates far beyond our bottom line.

As our stakeholders grow in scale and complexity, our principle to    do the right thing    for our employees,
customers, partners, shareholders, communities, and regulators remains constant. While their perspectives
may differ, we endeavor to engage thoughtfully with their concerns and to make decisions that ensure F5
continues to thrive now and into the future.
Turning adversity into strength: our commitment to security and innovation
As we entered fiscal year 2026, we encountered a defining moment in our company   s history. On October 15,
2025, we disclosed that a highly sophisticated nation state actor had gained unauthorized access to certain
internal F5 systems. Upon identifying the threat, we immediately activated our incident response process with
three clear priorities:
Containment and investigation. First, contain the threat actor, initiate a thorough investigation, and take
immediate and urgent action to strengthen F5   s security posture. While the investigation will continue and
the work of bolstering our security posture will expand, our initial steps were successful.
Protecting customers. Second, deliver reliable software releases to address all undisclosed high
vulnerabilities in F5   s BIG-IP code as quickly as possible. Through the exceptional efforts of our engineering
and support teams, we achieved this, enabling thousands of customers to promptly deploy critical updates
upon disclosure.
Many of our customers moved quickly to update their BIG-IP environments and a significant number of our
largest customers completed their updates within a matter of weeks with minimal disruption. Throughout the
process, customers expressed appreciation for our transparency and the clarity around exactly what they
needed to do to improve the security of their environments.
Enhancing security. Third, raise the bar on security across all aspects of our business. We are acutely aware of
the increasing sophistication of attackers and the fact that the threat surface is expanding rapidly. Over the last
several years we have aggressively increased our investment in security each year, and we are making further
significant investment this year and beyond. To further this work, Michael Montoya, a recognized cybersecurity
expert and former member of our Board, joined F5 in October as Chief Technology Operations Officer. Michael
brings deep operational expertise and will drive the execution of a robust roadmap to further enhance security
across our internal processes, environments, and products.
Our goal across our response actions was, and remains, better protecting our customers and we are confident
that F5 is now a stronger partner because of this experience. We are committed to learning from this incident,
sharing our insights with customers and peers, and driving collaborative innovation to collectively strengthen
the protection of critical infrastructure across the industry.
While our initial fiscal year 2026 guidance reflected the potential for near-term revenue headwinds resulting
from the incident, we believe the quality of our incident response and remediation, combined with our ongoing
commitment to innovation, our differentiated competitive positioning, and the trust we have built with customers
over decades will help to mitigate any long-term impact to our business.



 1/26/2026 Letter Continued (Full PDF)