Who are the Chinese tech companies bidding to buy Opera?

UPDATE 2/16: Opera notes that the acquisition isn’t actually final yet, as it still needs to be approved by shareholders and the Norwegian government. The title has been changed.

Fans of the popular mobile and PC browser Opera learned this week that the rumors were true: Opera has been sold to a consortium of Chinese tech companies. In the end, the Norwegian firm went for US$1.2 billion, and technically its acquirer is the Golden Brick Silk Road (Shenzhen) Equity Investment Fund II LLP. But if you find that name a bit of a mouthful you can dispense with it; Golden Brick is just an investment front. The big Chinese tech companies behind it are Qihoo 360 and Kunlun.

The rationale behind the acquisition is pretty simple. Qihoo and Kunlun get access to Opera’s global user base, and perhaps more importantly its global mobile advertising platform. Opera gets US$1.2 billion dollars and an easy way into the Chinese market through Qihoo and Kunlun’s sizeable user bases.

But how should Opera fans feel about their company’s new Chinese overlords? Meet the new bosses:

Qihoo 360

Qihoo CEO Zhou Hongyi at an event for his smartphone subsidiary Qiku.

Longtime Tech in Asia readers should already be familiar with Qihoo 360, which is China’s top internet and mobile security firm. But the company does much more than that, and its past five years have been marked with repeated attempts to branch out in all directions. It started a search engine, for example, with the aim of competing with Baidu, although it was never able to come close to Baidu’s market share. And it has tried repeatedly to get into the smartphone market, although none of its efforts has yet made a significant impression.

In China, Qihoo is a pretty controversial company; it has fiercely loyal fans and equally ardent detractors. That’s due in no small part to the company’s combative CEO Zhou Hongyi, who has a tendency to get involved in public fights with other tech companies. Qihoo is also pretty litigious and has sued several of its competitors over market disputes, although its record in China’s courts is pretty poor.

Perhaps most concerning if you’re an Opera fan, Qihoo has often been surrounded by rumors of foul play, fraud, and dirty tricks. Its apps have been banned from the iTunes store before (though exactly why is not clear), and a former employee once told Tech in Asia that teams at Qihoo work in “constant fear” because of the company’s toxic atmosphere.

Qihoo has denied most of these allegations, of course, and pursued legal action against some of its louder accusers. Still, there’s no denying that Qihoo’s reputation is far from squeaky clean in China. It doesn’t have much of a global presence yet, but it will be interesting to see if Zhou Hongyi brings his take-no-prisoners attitude to the global mobile advertising market. If he does, we could be in for an entertaining ride.

Kunlun

Kunlun is a less controversial and less high-profile company that’s known primarily for its mobile gaming operation. The Shenzhen-listed company also has a P2P fintech business, but it’s mainly about games: developing them, publishing them, and distributing them. It develops its own games, operates mobile and desktop app stores, and operates a gaming platform for Traditional Chinese language gamers.