Earlier this year opera was eyeing a $1.6 Billion dollar acquisition but after that deal fell through they made a deal with a conglomerate of chinese corperations including Qihoo 360 (a Chinese internet security company) and kunlun (a mobile game developer). Opera owns 1.9% of the desktop browser market share and over 10% of mobile.
Here are some quotes from shareholders,
“We all tried very hard to close the public offer and are naturally disappointed that we were unsuccessful. However, we believe that the new deal is very good for Opera employees and Opera shareholders,†said Opera’s CEO, Lars Boilesen. (Boilesen had been outspoken about the original deal being struck by shareholders without much buy-in from Opera’s staff. Some believed the original deal undervalued Opera).
“The Consumer part has good fit with objectives and strategy of Consortium, and will become part of ecosystem with substantial investment capacity. For Opera shareholders we are selling approximately ¼ of the company for $600m, which is an attractive price for this part of our business.â€
Opera will also be getting a new name and CEO.
All of this has raised concerns about opera users privacy as opera undoubtedly collects metadata. They have not made any statement about transfer of user information but we can only hope they at least give us an option to delete our information.
If you would like help in uninstalling and training on anew browser give us a call! We will transfer your favorites and passwords and homepage then train you on a new browser.
Sources: https://techcrunch.com/…/opera-renegotiates-its-1-2b-sale-…/
https://www.engadget.com/…/opera-browser-sold-to-a-chinese…/