Good morning. I'm Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst at Needham & Company. I'd like to introduce our next speaker. Frode Jacobsen is the Chief Financial Officer of Opera Limited, where he led the company's global finance organization since 2016. He oversees financial strategy, capital allocation, reporting, and investor relations as Opera has evolved from a browser company into a diversified consumer internet platform spanning search, advertising, and fintech services. Frode brings deep understanding and experience in public company finance and international operations, and he's played a central role in Opera's public market positioning and disciplined approach to growth and profitability. Before joining Opera, Frode built his career in management consulting and strategic finance. From 2008 to 2013, he worked at McKinsey & Company, where he advanced to Engagement Manager, advising clients on operations and strategic decisions before transitioning to the tech sector.
He joined Opera in 2013 as a Senior Director of Corporate Development, later serving as SVP of Strategic Initiatives before becoming CFO in 2016. Take it away, Frode. Look forward to hearing your presentation this morning.
Thanks, Laura. Thanks for the very kind words there so we thought to flip through our investor deck from the third quarter on this call. I'll try to be relatively quick so that there's some time at the end for questions. If you are new to us, you might still recognize the name Opera. We've been around for 30 years. It's a Norwegian company originally, and we make browsers. That's the core of what we do, the web browsers and then in terms of highlights of our size just to place this a little bit, we have close to 300 million monthly active users so it's a really big consumer play, more than maybe most, at least in the investor space, would think. I think we have more attention in the tech media probably than on FX still, but we're working on it. We've grown very quickly in Western markets.
We've developed our products for sort of the most high-end demanding users, which also has the greatest output potential, so over the past years, we've about tripled our average revenue per user. About $600 million of revenue, $140 million of adjusted EBITDA is what we guided for the full year 2025, which we will report next month, and in addition to sort of the growth story, one thing that's maybe a little bit unusual about us is that we are a recurring dividend-paying company. We pay a dividend every six months, so that's a 5%-6% yield or something on the stock, so it's a real dividend. We've also done buybacks, totaling about $500 million now since 2020. Characteristics of Opera, we've been around for a long time, so it's quite easy to validate, but I talked about the financial profile, and then it's the innovation.
So why I think we get so much attention in the tech media and why we are growing this very, let's say, the most demanding user base is through innovation. So I'll flip through our products shortly, and in particular, what we're doing on the AI side. So what's different between the Opera browser and Chrome or Edge or Safari is that we have multiple versions. On the PC side, we have our flagship browser called Opera One. If you haven't tried one of our browsers yet, maybe start with that. Then there's a GX for gamers and Opera Neon, which is the agentic browser. That's the most recent release. Same on mobile, various products tailored to the different operating systems and also such like gamers or Mini for sort of the more limited connectivity, data economic, and so on. I talked about the overall user base.
While we are still a small company, I mean, it is still about 6% of the global internet user base. You can see most of our user base is mobile. But on the PC side, you can see the Western market mix of our user base is the highest on PC. Europe is our home region. North America is also one of our historical strong locations as a very early innovator in the browser space back in the 1990s. I think we've been able to cultivate that brand and build on it. I mentioned innovation before, and here's like an example list spanning all three decades. Opera was the first browser with tabs, for example.
A lot of these things that are early on the list, everybody would just take for granted now, like full web on a smartphone or even a non-smartphone, started with Opera, built-in VPN, et cetera, and AI that has really led sort of the innovation and the changes in the products over the last really two plus years. In the beginning, we were the first one to integrate LLMs into the product. We are agnostic. We are independent of them, and so it's a nice symbiosis that for us, it's very natural to promote good tools in the browser, to create a loyal user base of the browser, and LLMs and these online tools are in search of growing their user base, so integrating and promoting works well both ways.
We've also launched our own Opera AI as a tool in the browser that can exist on top of any website that the user is on, and you can sort of, instead of feeding sort of a website dialogue with an AI service, a link and websites, it can exist on top of or on the side of the websites you're on. It can operate across the tabs, et cetera, and for the users that go all the way to Opera Neon, the AI is essentially opening tabs for the user, doing its research and synthesizing information and carrying out actions like populating meetings in the calendar, summarizing findings into a Slack message to somebody's team, et cetera, then I think maybe more just to give you a feel of what the products look like.
This Aria is now replaced by Opera AI, but you can see on the Opera Neon picture how you can sort of have a dialogue with the Opera AI. You can have it do stuff for you. You can have it make things for you. You can have it do deep research for you, et cetera. Once you launch a task, that task will execute within the browser, as I mentioned before. I think the screenshots aren't so good at maybe capturing it, but each task, it's almost like at a layer above the tabs how you used to. Then the task will manage a set of tabs that are relevant for whatever the user is looking for, finding out or making, et cetera. Moving to the gaming browser, it was the first, and I think it's still the only browser specifically made for gamers.
It's both the look and feel, but also like the content and what's being promoted, information about upcoming games, hardware, et cetera. And it's also technical things like setting how much memory, how much CPU the browser is allowed to use so that it doesn't eat up too much system resources. I mean, a typical user will maybe have two monitors, one for gameplay and one for sort of staying connected while playing. And so these are features that make it a very highly rated product amongst the gaming user base. And that's also a very attractive user base in terms of ability to drive revenue for us. So I talked through sort of the highlights, and then people always ask how big can it get? because the last time we reported was 33 million users.
It's already a significant part of our total revenue mix just because the output is so high. But we still think it's still early days. If we look at the number of PC gamers out there that are in Western markets that are on the young side, there's like a 10x potential. So that's what we are working to sort of grow into and continue to sort of raise awareness that these products exist because these are tend to be quite tech-savvy people that clearly appreciate the products when they use it. And so we're trying to get more people to discover it. Apart from the browser, we have started to talk a bit about MiniPay, which is a non-custodial wallet for stablecoins that we launched in our products in our mobile browser first.
Now it's a separate app as well in emerging markets where for the user being able to hold a major currency like the U.S. dollar can be a great advantage over local currencies. It also simplifies remittances, family abroad payments. It's useful for people who travel, et cetera. The product is still quite early, but it's grown very, very fast where the most recent number that the team has announced is exceeding 12 million wallets, over 360 million transactions. As you can see from this slide, it's present in many countries supporting very many currencies. The whole idea is to make it extremely easy for people to log into that app, put money into it, see that it's there, send it to a friend, or receive salary payment by using phone number as identifier, immediate, pretty much zero cost of transactions, and very fast.
So this is what's been driving the growth in that product, and I'm sure we'll be speaking more about it as it evolves. But it's a good example of something that our position allowed us to create this, both because technically we know it and because we have the reach and the trusted brand to expand beyond the core of browser. I mentioned in the beginning that we focused on the highest ARPU potential users. So here you can sort of see examples of cuts of user bases that fit that criteria and how the ARPU has developed over the past four years. I think we can just keep flipping.
In terms of the brand, you can see here, I don't know if you're in the 44% that knew us or in the 56% that don't yet, but still, as a relatively small company, having an awareness, 44% in the U.S., 60% in the U.K., 70% in Germany is a good starting point. There are many other one-point X billion dollar companies that are not there yet. And I think that's what we're trying to take advantage of that people keep us in mind and consider us in particular in the current days, let's say, where people are thinking more about how they browse, how they use AI, what tools they use online, and how they can optimize. And they ask other people for input and advice.
And then we are doing everything we can to just be visible because we think we can benefit a lot from all those industry dynamics that are happening around us. Revenue-wise, you can see about 37% in the third quarter of our revenue came from query-based, so meaning when the user is actively looking for something, which is typically still a search, a web search where we collect a revenue share, but it can also be through an AI dialogue or any other type of expressed intent that we then promote a partner and collect the revenue, most often a revenue share. And two-thirds of the revenue is per advertising. So when we have a pretty good sense that a person is interested in a certain product, then we promote it. But without the user having actually keyed in any kind of search to get to it.
This goes a bit more in detail on the revenue streams, but you can see it on our website. We show native ads in our products. We also target users when they are using other products instead of pulling it all through in our own native apps. On the query side, we have search, and I briefly mentioned that. We've been in contract with Google for over 20 years, so that remains our longest-standing partnership. So I guess we are in that camp, you could say. But I think a lot of excitement around how the new tools that people use to find information, but also find products will evolve and how we can integrate that to native experiences for people inside the browser and lifting it a bit up from just being a web page-based navigation, but creating a more native experience for the user.
In terms of where we are, the headquarters is in Oslo. We're present in European countries as our main hubs, and then our leadership team, I think without going through one by one, maybe just to call out this relatively stable team, we've worked together for a decade and more, and we've been through these various stages that have evolved around us, and I think the current stage that we find ourselves in is probably the fastest-moving one of all of them, which in a very startup mindset company like Opera creates a lot of excitement in this gang here, then briefly on the numbers, you can see our quarterly revenue on this slide. We're about to announce the fourth quarter. This is just showing what we guided, but as you can see, it's seasonally strongest.
We've talked a lot over the past couple of years about the opportunities that we've seen in both e-commerce, increasingly also travel, and those verticals have really accelerated very quickly, grown into becoming from under-indexing as part of our revenue mix. Probably still is, but it's been growing at well over 100% year- over- year, and you can see that's driven very strong growth over a longer time period than seen here, and on the profit side, we've been in sort of the we guided 23% for this year, which is a quite stable margin, so we've been essentially expanding our EBITDA dollars at the same pace that we've been expanding our revenue growth. Cost base, I think, is just another way of showing how we manage.
As an internet company that essentially produces apps, we can always tune how much money do we want to spend on marketing our products this way, how much will we invest in growth in the future versus finding a balance of how much profit we want in the near term, so I think what this slide is essentially showing is that we think that our profit margin, we are at a quite good balancing between because we do drive good growth, at the same time, we have good profitability and cash flow, and then in turn, ability to pay a dividend because all our growth is organic, and sometimes when we speak to people, they like us to invest even more in marketing and growth.
Other people are saying, "Oh, shouldn't you expand your profit a little bit more?" And so I think the fact that I have about 50-50 of those conversations means that we're probably doing a quite okay job in sort of allowing ourselves the balance between investment and profitability. You can also see the cash flow over the years and quite high conversion from EBITDA to cash flow. This Rule of 40, we've been consistent. So essentially, the sum of our revenue growth percentage and our EBITDA percentage, I think we've hit for 18 quarters now. And in terms of balance sheet, we don't have any financial debt. So we have a solid cash position. We have a stake in a company that we incubated almost a decade ago called OPay. We've been diluted over time.
The company's been extremely successful in scaling, but we hold a close to 10% stake in that. It's still a private company in addition to our cash, and as I mentioned in the opening, we've been paying dividends. We now have a recurring dividend program in addition to having repurchased almost 30% of our company relative to the shares outstanding at the beginning of 2020, so we've been active on that front, and I think that's it. I hope I've touched on all these points and we managed in 20 minutes, Laura, so that leaves some time for questions and maybe some time for people to get a quick break.
Okay, so let's see. Anybody who has a question from the audience, just put it into the chat at the bottom of your question, like the Q&A box, and I'll ask them. I'll have a couple for you.
So one is, what LLM are you building your answers product on?
I would say we are agnostic to that. Google is a key partner, so we work with Gemini and their various models. We have ChatGPT from OpenAI. We also run models locally in our own server infrastructure. So open-source models. We don't develop our own LLMs. And then what we try to do is to send a query to the most optimal LLM based on what the user is looking for, but the user doesn't have to choose.
Okay. Another thing is that one of the things that we're finding in advertising here is that the browser area, like the desktop, let me say it, the desktop device is full of fraud because every time Claude has an answer, it has to get it, visits 15 websites.
And every time Gemini has to give an answer, it visits eight websites. So that a lot of the browser, meaning the desktop kind of impressions are essentially fraud. They're not a person. So how do you combat that when you're basically 100% a browser company, which is a desktop idea?
I mean, I've heard of various stories around companies that are a bit affected by fraudulent actors and players, et cetera. This has not come up as an area of concern on our end. I think our traffic that we send to partners is screened, obviously, that it's real human beings that are going through real sites and behaving. And there are all these tracking ways or pixels to make sure that it's genuine.
So I know that there have been some stories in sort of the broader ecosystem around sort of fraudulent activities, but this is, I think, as a browser maybe of less relevant as a destination website.
Okay. One of the things that I think Wall Street's worried about is that there's less links out to the open web and that content generally on the open web shrinks. Do you have a point of view on that?
Again, I mean, we're not a website and a publisher. So essentially, the topic is, will there be, I guess, fewer websites out there because people stay in more, let's say, AI-enriched ecosystems that fetch the answers? We don't have a very strong view on that in either case because, of course, some other evolutions that have happened over the years is that probably the quality of search results have gone up, right?
So you could say that there are maybe people click less websites as a result of a search query because there's less clickbait going to the top of the search results. So that might lead to fewer websites, for example, or less web activity because the user more immediately goes straight to the destination that they're actually looking for. But again, since we're not web publishers, we're not an expert on that. We are more focused on sort of the actual application that people use to access the web. And we are working on exactly that, trying to enrich that experience to assist the user and make them more productive as they are browsing the web. So in a sense, I guess you could say that we are probably contributing to the same that you are describing.
Okay. Why have different browsers?
I understand that I can choose between Firefox and Google. Why would you have it? It seems like a lot of clutter and a lot of confusion for the consumer. Why do you have different browsers?
I mean, I don't think users necessarily have multiple browsers. I think people choose to. So what we are working on is that people should see the Opera browser and see the functionality, the features that the Opera browser have and think that, "Oh, this is a better browser actually for me than whatever came with my computer or my phone." And so they will replace their browser with the Opera browser. And we're pretty good at it, like at 284 million monthly active users. So we are doing a quite good job at being selected and being a challenger browser, challenger browser.
I think the reason why, because it maybe sounds like such an impossibility, is that the benefit, I mean, if you are the operating system default browser, like if you are the one that goes to the six-year-olds and eight-year-olds and everyone in between from tech-savvy to completely novice, then you have to be a very simple product. There's not a lot of, if you try the various browsers out there that come with operating systems, you won't notice much of a difference maybe. It looks about the same. It has about the same features. But since the only way we get the user is that they see a reason to switch, and they have to think like, "Oh, this is clearly different. There's something about this browser that is different from all the other ones." So our browsers tend to have a lot more built-in functionality, services.
We tend to be first with all kinds of innovation of how people use websites and access them. And that's how we get the loyal following because then people actually appreciate that because they are. So our user base maybe tends to be a bit more tech-savvy than the average person on the web. It tends to be younger than the average person probably on the web. And as I talked about, a higher probability of being a gamer given the browser that's specifically made for that audience.
Again, so that's my question. I don't understand why you have different browsers. One of the slides was one of the things we do differently is we have four browsers on this side and four browsers on this side. That's my question. Why is it better to have different, like a gamer browser and a browser called Neon? I don't understand.
I don't understand why that's different.
They're for different people. So the GX gaming browser is for the gamers. It's specifically made for their setup, for their hardware, the look and design of it, the features, the content that they care about. So if you are a gamer, you should really try out our GX, and that's the product that we market in channels that reach that audience. We don't push the One browser to the gaming audience, right? If you are more a general tech-aware focused, sort of following up on all the recent things, curious about AI and the functionality, then we will promote Opera One. If you're not a gamer, but just a general.
And then I think what we are quite good at is directing our marketing and our efforts and our outreach to the pockets of the population that know that they can actually install another browser, right? Because I think a lot of people, probably more than 50%, you just think like the internet is the internet. I click this blue icon with a compass on it or whichever one they use. And it just came with my Mac, and I always used it, right? So a lot of people will be that. And we are trying to find the ones that actually care enough that they know that they can install an alternative browser instead of using the one that came with the computer.
Okay. So I take that answer to be you're a late entrant. You have to fight for people to leave the Google Chrome browser.
You have these targeted markets that you market to segments to try to get them to leave whatever their prior habit is and come to your browser. Okay. So I understand that. My question is scale. Is there no benefit to scale that you are giving up by segmenting your browsers into these niche markets?
No, because very good question, actually. The backend is the same. The way we make our browsers is like a Lego piece where the core and the tech and all the security features and sort of all the things that keep the user safe or the people safe, it's all standard blocks. And then you have sort of the functionality content integrations that distinguish each. That it's just the final blocks on the top.
It's actually, if we had gone, I mean, you can look at Firefox because that is a product that looks a lot like the standard browsers. The problem is that what's the hook? Why is this like download Opera? It's exactly like Chrome or exactly like Safari. Then it's not really a call to action. So I think what we have seen is that we are successful because we are distinguishing ourselves.
Okay. And the business model is all advertising, right?
Advertising, yes. I mean, it's fair to say because it's all ultimately advertising. We call some of it query, but it just depends like the user is looking for something and we send to partners versus we are promoting something through advertising.
Okay. And is it all CPM-based? Not CPC, not CPA?
No, it's more or less exclusively performance-based.
So most common structure, I would say, rev share, especially when the user is looking for something. And then it's based on metrics like conversion, installation, et cetera. So it's performance-based.
So it's like lead gen. Like if you get a lead, like an in-app install is the idea. Is that what you're saying? But it's still an ad unit, isn't it? It's not like an e-commerce rev share. Like they sold a product and you get 20% of the profits. It's more they bid for an ad unit. And if they get a decent return, they keep increasing budget to you, right?
I mean, ultimately, it's always our partners are all global, usually always like global large companies that are very data sophisticated. And so they look at the traffic that we are sending them. What is the conversion they see?
What is the profitability that they are generating on that? And for these long-term, I talked about e-commerce, talked about travel. A lot of these long-term partners, Google Search, it's all revenue share. So it's like in that case, it's a direct correlation. But I would say even in the ones that are like payment for an action, a customer acquisition, an install, an activity, it's ultimately over time based on the value that we generate for the partner.
Okay. If anyone has a question, put it into the chat and I'll ask it of him. I don't have any so far.
So one of the things that Wall Street's really worried about right now, thinking about a lot like this since January 1st, is if we're going to get agentic commerce where the agent goes out and tells you, you ask it what camera to buy, and then it gives you three choices with a buy now button, that we're going to basically lose the entire purchase funnel, that there's real risks to the entire purchase funnel. We're not going to drive awareness. We're not going to drive a consideration. We're not going to drive search, which is the performance end or social, that just the agent's going to tell you, it's going to go out to the web, it's going to do research, and it's going to give you three choices to buy now. Do you have a point of view on that potential outcome of generative AI?
It's a very interesting topic because it is changing so quickly. I think we've seen companies get this very wrong in the AI. If you manage to get sued by Amazon, one of the biggest reasons, then I feel like, okay, there are smarter ways maybe to do this. I think there's definitely a lot of purchases that are mundane maybe that you appreciate the help of buying. And then there's a lot of shopping that people actually enjoy doing and where I'm looking for books. I'm looking for that. You get recommendations. You're looking for gear. Whereas I just need my groceries for tomorrow is kind of a very different activity. So I think just, I mean, the fact that shopping, even physical shopping, is something that people actually, I can't believe it, but people actually seem to enjoy it. So there's probably some balance happening here.
And I think our advantage, if you look at it through that lens, is as an independent company. Our business is the browser. It's not the side product. It's not like we make a phone, so we must also have a browser on it. So we've always been very well connected in the ecosystem. And I think we are known in the partner landscape as a company that always looked for like, "Hey, if we did this together, then we could both benefit." So I think that's the lens that we approach it with. But yeah, I mean, our products are all about sort of the built-in experience, the agentic opportunities, and bringing these tools to as many of our users as possible.
One of the things that Wall Street really wants to see is people licensing their first-party data to the LLMs to create another revenue stream.
The companies that are doing this usually are subscription or ad revenue or both. Then their valuation multiple explodes once they start selling first-party data to LLMs on an anonymized basis. Do you guys control your data that you have the right to sell it to an LLM like a Gemini or on an anonymized basis?
I think as a browser, I'm sure there's some place that could be. But if we lose the user's trust, if they think like, "Oh, if we use the Opera browser, then they're actually going to sell our data," then it's probably not a wise move. So I think as a European company with the global data protection rules, the Norwegian rules are even stricter. I think the privacy is extremely important. So I think we're still growing our revenue. I show the ARPU growth and all of that.
Of course, but not by retailing data.
Okay. Because I do think that's going to be a big revenue stream for a lot of companies. The data is the new black. The reason you care about first-party data is because you can sell it to somebody else. Frankly, if you can sell it to one of these competitors, they all have to buy it because they don't want their LLM to fall behind. But it sounds like that's not a revenue stream for you. Yeah, America, how much of your revenue now is America?
I think about 60% of our revenue comes from Western markets all in all. So let's say that's a combination of Europe and America. It's about half and half.
So 30% U.S.? Because they're really different privacy.
I was interviewing a CEO of a German company yesterday, and he's spending money on privacy with 80% of his revenue in the U.S. I said, "Stop spending money on privacy. Americans don't care about privacy. It's a waste of your money." But if you sit in Europe, you think privacy is a really big deal. But here, we've given up our—we'd rather have more targeted ads and more personalized ads, and we give up our privacy for that because we don't want to see diaper ads if we're 25 years old and don't have kids.
Of course, people log into the services that they use, right? People log into their Opera account if they want. So of course, once you're logged into Google, you search. Google keeps track of what you're searching on. Google is showing ads on many of the websites around you.
Of course, there's a lot of people that people voluntarily do, but I think there's even wanting to use the Opera AI and wanting to let it be aware of what you're reading so that it can give better answers and stuff like that. But I think there's a level beyond that, which is actively selling that data, which is something else, and actually using it for something that is directly enhancing the product that the user is on. And I think for a browser, that is probably a no-go. I imagine no browser is retailing their user data in that way. You don't think that Chrome is giving its data to Google Gemini?
I bet you're wrong. I bet you're wrong.
That is the wrong service. So people are logging into their Google accounts, and they are surfing in a logged-in experience.
But I don't think you can buy Gemini user stats from Google to inform whatever, right? I think it stays within the ecosystem.
Yeah, probably. Probably benefits their own Gemini. Okay, so we're up against time. Do I have any questions from the audience? Anyone? Anyone? Okay. I'm looking at my screen over here. Okay. I think we're up against time, so I'm going to call it there. Thank you so much for your time. What time is it in Norway?
Thanks for having us. Oh, it's just the afternoon.
Oh, okay. Good. It's like 8:00 A.M. here in New York. But anyway, thank you, guys. Great slides. Thank you for coming. I look forward to seeing you guys either in person or on a video screen soon.
Yeah.
Thank you very much for your time. Take care. Bye.
Thanks. Bye. Bye.