Opera receives offer of 1.09 billion euros from Chinese consortium
Browser builder and advertising company Opera from Norway has received an offer from the Chinese companies Kunlun and Qihoo 360. They want to take over all shares for an amount of 10.5 billion Norwegian kroner, about 53 percent more than the market value on Friday, February 4.
Trading in Opera shares was halted on Monday after rumors of a possible takeover. This rumor came into the world partly after the postponement of the presentation of the annual figures until Wednesday. Kunlun and Qihoo 360 will be supported for the acquisition by two investment companies, Golden Brick and Yonglian. Opera Software had been looking for an acquisition partner since August 2015, after lower than expected revenue in the second quarter.
Opera is best known to the general public for its mobile browser and to a smaller audience for its desktop browser, but the company is also active in data compression technology and in the advertising business. The Opera Mini browser was a popular mobile browser before iOS and Android took a lot of market share, especially for its ability to compress web pages on Opera’s servers and send them to the browser at a fraction of their original size. That function did not work with https pages, but was practical at the time with the emerging and still slow and expensive mobile internet. Vodafone, for example, supplied Opera Mini on phones under its name for a while and Microsoft recently announced that the Nokia 230 would use the Mini browser as standard.
The Opera Mini browser held 7.28 percent of the global mobile browser market in January, according to NetMarketshare. This makes it the third largest browser after Chrome, Safari and Android Browser, which have 41.57, 34.12 and 11.13 percent of the market respectively. Opera claims to have about 350 million users of all its products worldwide.
One of the members of the Chinese consortium, Kunlun, recently took a majority stake in dating app Grindr for gay men. Kunlun is originally a maker and publisher of mobile games and Qihoo provides security products for the web and mobile.