Opera CEO: ‘We’re more like a Chinese company than a Western company’

For many smartphone owners, it’s tough to get excited about a mobile browser. While power users will always have their app of choice for specific features, most internet users likely default to a mobile browser for no reason at all.

As a result, many Western consumers don’t even understand why Opera exists. With Safari for iOS, Chrome for Android, and Firefox for nerds, does the world really need another app to surf the web?

A closer look at Opera’s history, business model, and traction in Asia shows how that assumption is a little short-sighted. The company 350 million global monthly active users across its app suite, 250 million of which also use Opera Mini, its most popular browser. Half of those users are on iOS and Android, but the remainder are on Blackberry, Bada, Symbian, and other platforms that now make up the mobile long tail. Opera Mini has a serious presence in developing markets where data plans are expensive and networks are lousy. This includes India and Indonesia, where it has 50 million and 30 million MAUs respectively.

“We think global,” says Opera CEO Lars Boilesen in conversation with Tech in Asia. “We don’t go to the US anymore. We don’t go to Norway or Denmark. We go to big emerging markets.”

Throughout its twenty-year lifespan, Opera has simultaneously played the role of underdog and forward-thinker. Founded in 1995, the company got its start building desktop browsers. Boilesen (who joined Opera in 2000) admits that this was a losing game after Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows, adding that it set the stage for the company’s future.

“We realized that eventually there would be internet on devices other than just PCs,” says Boilesen. “So while Netscape and Microsoft made their browsers bigger and bigger, we just made our browser smaller and smaller. That way, when manufacturers started testing out browsers for mobile phones, we were ready.”

Boilesen says that Opera built browsers for “50 to 60 different platforms” in order to become the most ubiquitous browser for push-button phones.

That strategy – borne partially out of necessity – turned out to be both a blessing and a curse for Opera. To a certain extent, Boilesen explains, it put the firm back on the skids once the iPhone introduced touchscreen smartphones. A company that built browsers for countless devices would once again get nudged out by the default choices.

“We asked ourselves, where can we be relevant? It was hard in the US, where we had focused on in the past, because browsers had become a bit commoditized. There were open-source browsers, iOS had a good browser, and Android had a good browser.”

Lars Boilesen, CEO of Opera

On the other hand, Opera’s investment in feature phones helped give it a strong edge in emerging markets like India, Indonesia, and Brazil – where consumers couldn’t afford iPhones, and where allegiance to PC software remained less sticky.

“We said to ourselves, let’s go to big markets where people aren’t online yet. We went to Russia, Indonesia Brazil, Latin America, Vietnam – we didn’t care where the most profitable users were, we just wanted a big audience.”

Singing in duets