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The Opera browser, which dates back to the mid-90s, when PCs used Windows 95 and Steve Jobs ran Next Computer after being fired from Apple, will return to the public markets.
Nasdaq Global Select Market, having eventually sold 115 million US dollars in shares. The company based in Oslo, Norway, will sell 9.6 million shares at 12 US dollars each, the top of a planned band, according to people with knowledge on the subject.
Created by two engineers from Norway Telenor, Jon von Tetzchner and Geir Ivarsoy, the first major release of Microsoft's Windows browser, were Opera 2.1, released in 1997. Netscape Navigator – the predecessor of Mozilla Firefox – was the winner of the first browser battle, while Internet Explorer waited patiently for the opportunity before it became so dominant a decade later that it led to the intervention of regulators.
Opera acquired a series of sectarian users, who scorned market leaders and helped cement their place as the third most popular browser in the world at that time. Von Tetzchner's refusal to take the company to public markets during the infamous dotcom boom has also contributed to that Opera is one of the few survivors of the accident that has followed, with Amazon.com and EBay.
Today Opera generates more than 50% of its turnover thanks to its badociation with Google's Alphabet and Yandex NV based in Moscow, and mentions the dependence of a small number of companies for the majority of its profits as a significant risk factor in its perspective. In the three months to March 31, Opera recorded a net profit of US $ 6.6 million based on a turnover of US $ 39.4 million, up 55% over same quarter of last year. 19659003] This will also mark his return to public life. The company began trading on the Oslo Stock Exchange in 2004, raising some 20 million US dollars. Two years later, he launched Opera Mini, a mobile browser that allowed customers to explore real-size websites through the limited cellular data networks that existed at that time.
But when the next "browser wars" were fierce between Internet Explorer, Firefox and a nascent Google Chrome by the end of the decade, the future of Opera has changed course. Ivarsoy died in 2006 and von Tetzchner left the company in 2011 after having disagreements with investors regarding the company's management.
"I think that initially, they only wanted to sell the business," von Tetzchner said. . "In that the investors were concentrated, they always believed that they could get better returns this way."
A purchase of the majority stake of $ 1 billion by a consortium of investors Chinese was planned for 2016, but the operation did not get government approval and has never been materialized. The company, on the other hand, agreed to sell only its browser – now called Opera – for 575 million US dollars, which will be listed on the Nasdaq.
The rest of the original company was renamed Otello Corporation in 2017 and continues trading in Oslo. 19659011]
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