Fastly Shares Jumped 6% After CFO Repeated Already-Known Numbers at a Conference

Fastly stock climbed 6% to close at $23 on Wednesday, September 9, after CFO Rich Wong spoke at Citi's Global TMT Conference and pitched the edge-cloud company as something bigger than a content delivery network, according to Tikr.

"I just think that this business on being on the edge cloud is much broader than just a CDN business," Wong told the room, according to Tikr's account of his remarks.

Fastly did not file an 8-K or issue a press release tied to that Wednesday move, according to Tikr. Wong wasn't announcing new numbers. He was connecting figures that had already been sitting in two quarters of filings. The market spent the day repricing a story, not reacting to news.

The Numbers Behind the Pitch

Fastly's most recent quarter showed revenue of $183 million, up 23.3% year over year, according to both Yahoo Finance and MarketBeat. Gross margin hit a record 65.8%, and operating margin came in around 15%, per Wong's own comments at the conference.

The company has now posted four straight profitable quarters and six consecutive quarters of positive free cash flow, Wong said. That's real progress for a company that spent years bleeding cash as a straight CDN player competing on price against bigger rivals.

Simply Wall St's financial model shows Fastly's current net position as a loss of $81.1 million, with the company's own forecast projecting a swing to $76.8 million in earnings by 2029. Wong's "four consecutive profitable quarters" and the trailing GAAP loss Simply Wall St cites aren't measuring the same thing. One is likely a non-GAAP or operating profitability figure; the other reflects the full accounting picture, including stock-based compensation. Investors cheering the profitability headline should know which number they're actually buying.

Where the Growth Is Actually Coming From

Network services, the legacy delivery business, still makes up 73% of revenue and grew 17% year over year, according to MarketBeat. Security revenue grew 43% and now accounts for roughly 23% of the total. The remaining bucket, mostly compute and observability, grew 69%, though it's still small in absolute terms, around $7 million a quarter according to MarketBeat's account of Wong's remarks.

Security and the "other" segment combined crossed a $49 million run rate last quarter and grew more than 50% year over year, Wong said, per Tikr. Seeking Alpha's Miletus Research, writing in a bullish analysis dated September 2, framed the same combined segments as a $200 million run rate growing 46% annually, which is roughly consistent once quarterly figures are annualized.

Fastly's head of investor relations, Vernon Essi, said content delivery network pricing has stabilized over the past three quarters after what he called a period of "irrational pricing" from smaller competitors that have since exited the market, according to MarketBeat. Even with that stability, delivery pricing keeps declining in the mid- to high-single-digit percentage range year over year, Essi said, meaning Fastly is fighting a shrinking price per unit even as volume grows.

AI Traffic and the Bull Case

Wong pointed to machine-generated request volume, tied to bots and AI agents, growing sixfold, according to Tikr. He argued that traffic increasingly favors Fastly's security products, which price by the request, over its delivery business, which prices by the gigabit. Net revenue retention hit 117%, described by Tikr as a three-to-four-year high, and remaining performance obligations grew 38% year over year with the committed portion up 44%.

Seeking Alpha's Miletus Research holds a disclosed long position in Fastly and set a $34 price target, implying 50% upside from current levels. Simply Wall St's model, by contrast, puts fair value at $27 against a listed price of $22.71, about 19% upside. Both projections came after the same conference remarks, and both carry the caveat that Fastly still has to prove it can sustain profitability against competitive pricing pressure and customer concentration risk, a point Simply Wall St raised directly.

None of the five quarters of transformation Wong described are in dispute. The question is whether Fastly's next actual earnings report, not another conference appearance, shows security and compute revenue continuing to outpace delivery at the rates Wong described on stage.