Chinese Investors Buy Opera Software For $1.2 Billion

Opera Software will be sold to Chinese investors for $1.2 billion the Norwegian company announced Tuesday night.

After being offered a 53% premium on their stock shares from a group of Chinese investors led by billionaire Zhou Hongyi’s Qihoo 360 Software and Kunlun Tech, Opera Software’s board of directors and executive team unanimously recommended that all other investors accept the offer.

Opera is best known for its eponymous Web browser, which was popular on early mobile devices, but Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox beat out that division of its business in recent years.

The company then switched tacks to mobile advertising, opening Opera Mediaworks in 2013, a division that grew 41% in 2015 and earned most of Opera’s profits.

Of the $193.5 million in revenue Opera reported last year, mobile ad products accounted for $145.4 million.

The mobile video space, which Opera Mediaworks operates in, is expected to grow by leaps and bounds as the technology enabling high definition streaming becomes more commonplace among mobile device users.

Kunlun Tech and Qihoo bring Opera’s fast-growing mobile ad business to a new audience in China, where users tend to be mobile-first or mobile-only, while simultaneously opening up their products to Opera’s user base.

Qihoo is a large provider of Internet and mobile security products, while Kunlun Tech is a gaming company, which reportedly bought a majority stake in the gay and bi-sexual dating app Grindr for $93 million in January.

Opera has been fielding inquiries since late last summer when mobile video ad spend started to increase drastically.

Next story loading loading..