Opera's board recommends accepting Chinese buyout offer

Opera, once famed for its web browsers, is apparently struggling to make ends meet. So much so that it has hired Morgan Stanley International to search for a buyer. That buyer has just come into the picture from halfway around the world. A consortium made up of Chinese bigshots Kunlun and Qihoo 360 have signified their intention to buyout the Norwegian company for $12 billion. Backed by investment funds Golden Brick and Yonglian, Opera's board is more than convinced that this is the right way to go for the former Internet giant.

If you have been part of the Internet and cellphone crowd for the past 20 or so years, you might already be familiar with Opera's name. Before Firefox, Chrome, or Safari started butting heads in our smartphones, Opera was king of the mobile browser race, with a presence even in what some now call feature phones. It's not that hard to see why it became popular. Back then, Internet connectivity, cellphone storage space, and screen resolution were at a premium. Opera offered to bypass those all by compressing browser traffic through its servers, bringing down data consumption, compressing web pages, and saving users money.

This day and age, however, those benefits are mostly, but not completely, lost on some of the major smartphone markets. While it still makes browers, for desktop and now for Android as well, Opera has since then diversified to other products, all still related to the Internet. Opera Max, for example, offers the same data compression benefits applied to all Internet traffic coming to and from Android apps. Opera also has a Smart TV platform that it advertises will be pre-installed on some TV sets this year. And just yesterday, it announced the Apps Club "Netflix-like" Android app market. And of course, it makes some money out of advertising over all of those.

While those might not look like signs of a company in financial trouble, a buyout definitely is. Opera's board is interestingly all on board (pardon the pun) with the buyout offer and believe that ownership will help Opera serve its users better. How the Chinese consortium plans to use Opera's businesses hasn't been disclosed yet. Considering how everyone seems to be in favor of the buyout, those details could come very soon.

VIA: ZDNet