Opera acquires Skyfire labs for $155M | Hacker News Reader

Opera acquires Skyfire labs for $155M

mashable.com

39 pointsanigbrowl22 comments

I never would have thought that Opera had $155 million to spend on an acquisition. Does their browser make any money?

licensing fees mostly. they have sales of roughly $200 million a year. not sure about profit though but I assume they are profitable and they can get additional funding from stock market by selling some shares.

I don't see how the desktop browser would make money, but Opera Mini is preinstalled on a large number of low-end devices. I imagine these bundling deals are quite profitable to the company, since Opera Mini is seeing a lot of use on those low-end phones.

Wikipedia has some recent numbers: "In February 2013, Opera reported 300 million unique Opera Mini active users and 150 billion page views served during that month." [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini

Opera is also on some smart TVs and on Nintendo Wii.

The Desktop version gets payments from search vendors, Google pays significant sums to browser vendors to be the default search engine. But of course the bigger part of their income comes from the mobile.

Opera also own the ad network AdMarvel, I seem to recall an article regarding their profits. A large chunk of Opera Softwares revenue comes from AdMarvel, in addition to their license sales.

They're listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange, with a market cap of approximately $770 million, so financing a $155 million acquisition doesn't seem like it'd be a problem.

Looking in there quarterly report for 4Q 2012 it looks like they can afford this. According to it revenue for 2012 as a whole appeared to be $216 millions, earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) was $50 millions[0].

Also, according to an article in Digi.no[1] $100 million is borrowed in the bank. The total price is up to $155 million, but is dependent on an earn-out, so maybe the full sum isn't payable yet?

0: http://media.opera.com/media/finance/2012/4Q12.pdf

1: http://www.digi.no/911670/opera-kjoper-opp-konkurrenten

I submitted the original source 3 hours ahead of Mashable's rehash: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5224687

Congrats for Skyfire.

Knowing a few people there good to see them acquired by an interesting company. They've certainly changed a bit from the early days with the initial product being on WinMo (i was an early engineer there). The move makes some sense with Opera's embracing of WebKit.

I do agree with the other poster - opera had $155m? You learn new things every day.

It's suspicious, since nobody uses the browser. It's certainly unreliable in a work environment and the worst browser on the iPhone.

Sorry to be the wet blanket at this love-in, but maybe, just maybe Opera isn't what it appears.

Believe it or not, the rest of the world aren't all using smartphones. Opera Mini dominates the less-than-smart phone space.

Does anyone have info on the Opera Unite story? I remember it being well received when it was announced but clearly it never gained traction. I see Opera have now canned it.

Perhaps a bit ahead of its time? In the next few years my country (.au) will be wired up with fibre to the home which makes this browser p2p thing more attractive. Also WebRTC seems timely.

It was a nice idea, but it was in an odd place:

• too consumer-oriented for geeks to use it as a serious server (it was a JS-based server before node.js!)

• too geeky to be used by mainstream consumers. People may want control and privacy, but they don't want to deal with problems of ADSL+NAT and keeping their machine running 24/7.

I joined Opera just before Unite was released. People told me that the idea was very old. They've been prototyping and re-working the product and were not 100% happy about it whet it was finally released.

It seems to me that at that time it would be a great idea to wrap the API into some mix of standards that emerged over time (IndexDB, AppCache, etc.) That way writing Unite applications would attract web developers interested in HTML5. It didn't happen and most web developers saw some proprietary API for a browser with a small marketshare. No wonder it didn't took off.

Something similar may appear on top of WebRTC like you suggested.

You can still use it on Opera 12 if you reenable it. They're killing their own DNS servers for it, but it will work if you set your own DNS with ddns http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/custom-domains-opera-unit...

Busy week for Opera, a transition to WebKit and a big acquisition. I wonder if the Skyfire purchase indicates Opera is going to make a far bigger push to try and capture market share in mobile browsing, where at the moment there's far fewer competitors and an ever increasing marketshare to tap into.

Mobile can be way to capture desktop too. If you decide to use Opera on mobile, sync (Opera Link - http://www.opera.com/link/ ) can convince you to use it on desktop as well.

I would especially love having sessions accessible on both devices. I believe it's not possible at the moment.

Nice point! That'd certainly have a draw for a lot of people, and I don't believe people have as much invested in their browser choice than they used too.

From the Opera press release[1]:

"Both companies have evolved far beyond their browser roots. Skyfire adds capabilities to our portfolio around video, app optimization, smartphones and tablets, and strength in North America. With video expected to consume over two-thirds of global mobile bandwidth by 2015, and as time spent on Android and iOS apps explodes, we are excited to extend Opera’s solutions for operators.”

In short, you are correct that Opera will continue on their long-standing mission to capture more mobile browsing market share, however the acquisition announcement indicates that they see money in beefing up their non-browser product offerings.

The main reason is revenue: SkyFire is a relatively new company to the mobile carrier space, with three confirmed customers and on-going trials at ten others[2]. Opera has OEM connections and a long history in the mobile carrier industry, since they were originally spun off from Telenor R&D[3]. I speculate that Opera has been looking at ways to increase revenue over the years beyond licensing their mobile browser.

Whether they're hitting an organic limit (diminishing returns) to their mobile browser adoption, or whether they feel that it's time to diversify their revenue streams, this is a good play for them because SkyFire brings a compelling platform to the table with a different set of customers that they understand.

Here are my informal notes on Opera's strategy w.r.t. to SkyFire:

1) WebRTC - Opera is one of the sponsoring entities for WebRTC. They've thrown in their chips so that their R&D efforts can be complimentary and hopefully faster.

2) Video end-to-end - Opera wants to play in the mobile operator space as a solution provider, and video is a hot and inevitable trend. They want to leverage client standards based work AND a backend play (SkyFire acquisition). New revenue stream if operators buy/subscribe to the SkyFire solution.

3) Browser adoption - Nothing new here; executing on their original strategy but now with hopefully more support from other areas of the ecosystem to make their mobile browser more attractive over others.

(Disclaimer: I work for a company offering video optimization solution. Opera is now one of my competitors as SkyFire was before.)

[1] http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2013/02/15/

[2] Ibid.

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenor

Opera really needs to focus on their core product: the browser. Its truly lost its way. I uninstalled the desktop version a few months back because of it's so flaky and unreliable.

On the iPhone, it's being blown away by upstarts like 360, Mercury and especially the slick Dolphin browser.

Chrome is still the best browser IMO, but like I said in an earlier comment, IE9 is surprisingly snappy. Stop being a snob and try it out.

As for Opera, can't truss it.

Is the desktop their core product? Or is the feature phone their core product? Opera Mini is big.

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