Rolls-Royce has been the FTSE 100‘s biggest success story in recent years. No stock comes remotely close to matching its 1,338% return since mid-2021.
Understandably, investors who haven’t held Rolls-Royce will think they’ve missed the boat. Others who own the stock might be looking for opportunities elsewhere.
Either way, I think two UK shares have a lot of long-term potential. They could even outperform Rolls-Royce over the next five years.
First up, we have Raspberry Pi (LSE:RPI). The FTSE 250 tech firm is known for selling single-board computers to hobbyists, and still does, but its products are also being used to run lightweight AI models and edge applications locally on devices.
For example, Raspberry Pi’s AI HAT+ 2 board enables customers to run both LLMs and VLMs (vision language models). This AI angle has seen the share price more than double year to date.
It’s not all hype, though. The Arm Holdings-backed company’s revenue is expected to almost double this year, to about $608m, with a 60% growth in earnings per share.
This follows strong unit growth last year, particularly in the US (+56%) and China (+62%). Notably, 2025 was the first time that semiconductor units, which increased 47% to 8.4m, exceeded single-board computers and modules (7.6m).
A risk here, however, is margin pressure due to the memory chip shortage, which has driven prices higher and is expected to last into 2027. Raspberry Pi is being forced to pass on costs to customers, and this could hit growth and hurt its value proposition.
The forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio is also around 50, which is quite high. This tells us the market is pricing in strong future profit growth, something that needs to happen for this investment to work out well.
Taking a long-term view though, I’m bullish here. The innovative company is growing strongly in smart home, aerospace and defence, and has an untapped edge AI-related opportunity opening up.
For the record, I recently bought some shares after they fell 35%. I think this is a buying opportunity worth exploring further, especially on any further dips. But investors should expect volatility as the norm.
Booming space and defence markets
Next, I’m going to highlight Filtronic (LSE:FTC) from the FTSE AIM 100 index. While still up 2,300% over five years, the stock has crashed 44% in just two months.
I think this presents a dip-buying opportunity to consider, because the long-term growth story for the radio communications firm remains intact. This is underpinned by its partnership with SpaceX, to which it provides components for the Starlink satellite network.
SpaceX has big ambitions to grow this constellation, from around 10,000 satellites today to more than 42,000. And Filtronic has been expanding from ground-based communications into satellite payload hardware, enlarging the market opportunity.
On the flip side, the biggest risk here is customer concentration, with SpaceX accounting for the vast bulk of revenue today. Were something to go awry with this partnership, Filtronic shareholders would feel the pain immediately.
On balance though, the risk/reward set-up looks much more favourable after the near-50% crash. And with Filtronic laser-focused on the booming defence sector to diversify sales, I reckon the stock is worth a closer look around 260p.
Should you invest £5,000 in Raspberry Pi Plc right now?
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Ben McPoland owns shares in Raspberry Pi.
