Opera Software to turn Chinese in $1.2bn buyout

Chinese consortium keen to pay a premium for Chrome clone browser company

The board of Opera Software, the Norwegian web browser pioneer, has agreed a $1.2bn acquisition by a consortium of Chinese investors as its six-month hunt for a buyer reaches fruition.

The company effectively put itself up for sale in August when it hired investment bank Morgan Stanley to sniff out anyone interested in acquiring it. That decision followed a decline in earnings due to its continuing loss of market share in browsers, compounded by lower advertising sales.

The consortium buying the company includes security company Qihoo 360 and internet firm Beijing Kunlun Tech. The deal is backed by the investment funds Golden Brick and Yonglian Investment.

In addition to the Opera web browser, which is - or used to be - particularly popular in parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the company also offers the SurfEasy virtual private networking service. It also has intellectual property in mobile and slimline web browsers, technology that is embedded in a range of "smart" and other devices.

"The transaction would give Opera access to the extensive internet user base of Kunlun and Qihoo in China as well as the financing and other support of the Consortium that would allow for the full potential of the company to be realised. At the same time, Kunlun and Qihoo would be able to cross-sell their products and services to the Opera user base, and benefit from Opera's leading mobile advertising platform," said the company in a statement this morning.

The buyers would appear to be keen to acquire Opera - offering 53 per cent above its closing price on Thursday, before the company's shares were suspended on Friday by the Oslo stock exchange as rumours of a takeover gathered pace.

Opera switched from its in-house developed Presto rendering engine to Google's open-source Chromium project in August 2013 after pre-announcing the shift in February that year. The company justified the move claiming that the Presto code had become too unwieldy. The shift also helped it to cut costs and a number of staff were made redundant later that year. However, users were also lost in the transition - and they don't appear to have come back.

Its co-founder and former CEO, meanwhile, Icelander Jon von Tetzchner, set up a new web browser software company in 2015, called Vivaldi, which promises to be faster than established browsers - including Opera.