After slower than expected growth, Opera Software considers sale, hires investment bankers to help with strategic review
Norway's Opera warns on growth, says firm may be sold — * Says has interest from a number of parties — * 2015 revenue now forecast lower at $600 mln to $618 mln
Context & Ripple Effects
Opera has now cut its 2015 revenue forecast twice inside six months — the latest warning drops guidance to $600M–$618M, per the second downward revision — and is responding by hiring investment bankers for a strategic review with interest already flagged 'from a number of parties'. For a 21-year-old Norwegian browser maker squeezed out of the desktop default wars, the review is an admission that independence no longer funds the growth story.
What makes the move worth watching is how it resolves: within a year Opera agrees to sell, with a Chinese consortium taking the browser and other businesses for $600M while carving off the ad, marketing, TV, and game operations — and the company ultimately resurfaces on Nasdaq via its 2018 US IPO, which raised $115M.
First-order effects
- Potential acquirers get a formal process into one of the last independent browsers, while Opera's public shareholders absorb a second guidance cut to $600M–$618M in a single year.
Second-order effects
- A sale splits the company along business lines rather than keeping it whole: the browser goes to new owners while the advertising, marketing, TV, and game operations are separated out, forcing each side to find standalone economics.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, sub-scale European consumer-software firms stop trying to compete as integrated independents and instead get carved up by foreign buyers, then re-listed in US markets once restructured — Opera itself completes that arc when it returns to public markets after its sale.
The trend: Mid-cap consumer internet companies under sustained growth pressure are increasingly resolved through break-up sales and cross-border buyouts rather than turnaround as independents.