Hotchkis & Wiley Global Value Fund on F5, Inc.
Thesis
Hotchkis & Wiley believes F5 is misunderstood because the market often classifies it as a legacy IT hardware vendor. The company sells application networking and security software as well as data-center appliances, and its quarterly results were strong enough for management to raise both revenue and EPS guidance. The fund argues that this misclassification creates an attractive valuation for a business it judges to have better-than-average fundamental risk characteristics.
“The company is misunderstood and gets incorrectly classified as a legacy IT hardware vendor, resulting in an attractive valuation for a company with better-than-average fundamental risk ratings.”