Hopefully, this is on. Okay, so we'll keep going for our next one. Happy to have the team from Opera here at the conference this year. I'm gonna have a fireside chat with Frode Jacobsen, CFO. Great to see you, and thanks for coming and being part of the conference this year. Thanks for having us. Okay, so for those in the audience that are maybe less familiar with Opera, why don't we start with an overview of the platform, and what you're trying to build from a product standpoint, and where the company's positioned over the medium to long term? Okay. Big question. Big question. Always start big, and then we narrow it down. I mean, so Opera is a Norwegian company. We've been around for 30 years next year. We make web browsers, so we essentially compete with, you know, the browsers that come with phones or PCs by default. We built a 300 million user base, about 300 million MAUs over the years. And maybe some other like intro facts, revenue-wise, we've guided to exceed $460 million this year, so 17% growth rate. We've guided EBITDA margin to 24%, so we're happily in that Rule of 40- Yeah category for three-plus years now, and then what part of your question have I not answered yet? I think that's a good way- Okay To maybe kick it off and start. I mean, let's start with the user base before we go into anything. Why don't you give folks a sense of the demographics of the user base, the geographic concentration of the user base, just so people can level set on who uses your products, what do they look like, and where are they in the world? Yeah, so 300 million, as mentioned. Yep. If I do geographic first, about 50 million are in Western markets, so meaning North America and Europe, and then about 250 million elsewhere. That 17%, that's the Western part of the user base, is more than half of our revenue, so it's by far the highest monetizing region. And then beyond geography, we focus on high ARPU potential users in general, so we've focused a lot on these regions lately. But also, we have a browser made specifically for gamers that is obviously a super engaged type of user base with a relatively high online spend. Demographics, I think our user base tends to be younger, can be tech-savvy, can be that gamer category, but younger and tech I think are quite typical denominators. I can attest that my gaming teenage son is squarely in that base of users. Yeah, yeah. On the gaming side of the browser product. Longer term, how do you think that mix might change? Okay. You know, when you look at the company as a snapshot today, and you line it up against some of the strategic priorities for the company, what might that look like somewhere down the road? Or how might the priorities get reflected in a shifting mix in the business? So I would say, we talked about gamers now. Yeah. That's about 10% of our user base, up from zero, or we didn't at least have an app or a browser made for gamers some years back. Western base has doubled in our base from, like, 8%, 9% to 17%-ish now. When we look at how we spend our marketing dollars to raise awareness, because that's the battle, right? Yeah. We deliver products that do something different than the standard, and then we have to make people aware that we exist, and that spend is focused on these categories predominantly. So I think the continued growth in... What we will do, we'll keep investing in sort of those high ARPU potential use- Yeah - base, part of the user base. Yeah. Okay. One of the most interesting developments in the last sort of six, twelve months has been the introduction of the Digital Markets Act in Europe. When you think about what that act and legislation might do to the competitive environment in Europe, maybe refresh folks a little bit on how you're positioning yourself strategically and competitively to take advantage of the potential for more competition in the European Union more broadly on the back of the DMA. Yeah, sure. I mean, first, the DMA, maybe everyone here knows what it does, but it defines some companies as gatekeepers. Yep ... if you have sufficient power. And then in our case, it means the most recent change that's positive to us is that Apple on iOS is required to inform people that they can use a browser different than Safari, and they can make a choice. Google has been doing that for some time in Europe, at least. I think to us, this is very... We have been competing then for nearly thirty years against owners of operating systems, so of varying degrees, let's say, of openness. So we have gotten quite good at existing in that space and sort of competing, partnering, and finding a niche that works and that we can grow from. But of course, any regulator government sort of focus on steps that promote competition further, we are very excited about it. So, it, you know, in this case, Apple, they are, you know, they are tailoring to the requirements around them, et cetera. But, but it, to us-... That now the sum of the things that have happened means that iOS is a more, is a, is a platform that we want to invest in. Up until this year, it was really Android that was the focus of our user base on mobile. And the, you know, of our total user base, over two hundred million are mobile users, so it's the biggest part of it. Very Android focused. So I think now on iOS, when at least in Europe by now, I hope it cascades to more regions, users can set Opera as their default browser, was not possible earlier. Users are informed about it. And then we are still working on the ability to use our own technology, like under the hood, to render websites, et cetera but I think for us, we are quite excited about it. It means that we consider iOS a platform that we can invest in scaling. Yeah. Not an overnight kind of from one day to the next, but it's at least in Europe, then the mobile target population is twice as big as it was before. Because now we can also focus on iOS, and when we guide marketing spend, et cetera, we take that into account. So maybe sticking with that last point you made right there, in terms of with competition opening up like this, how does it change your strategic focus in terms of where you want to invest, the levels you want to invest? And maybe help, if you can, share for folks what might be some of the early learnings as competition has opened up, in terms of what that might mean for new users, adapting your products? Still quite early, I would say, and we saw a nice benefit. We talked a bit publicly about it, too, about the inflow of new users on iOS, but that was without us doing anything. So we were positively surprised that actually, before really putting in the work on the product, we already see a positive impact of it. Still from a small base, right? Because this is the platform where we had a few million users, and a small part of the base. I think now we've launched our flagship browser on iOS. That happened after this. We plan to be more visible around iOS. We promote more on iOS to scale it. And then I think we are, of course, very pleased that the EU is doing this, and it's good for, we believe, European users to promote competition, hoping it then cascades, right, to other geographies as well, such as this one. Yes, understood. Well, sticking with this geography a minute, maybe we'll switch to Google Search and the partnership in that with them. Obviously, they went through a lot of antitrust issues in Europe a number of years ago, and now they're going through a series of antitrust issues here in the United States. But you have a partnership with Google on the Search side. Then, you know, the Search landscape does have the potential to change in the next few years. Why don't you walk us through the current relationship with Google today, and how changes in the antitrust landscape could impact that relationship, medium to long term, or open up more competition? Yeah. I mean, I would put it under the same general umbrella as the EU discussion that we just had. So here we have the DOJ wanting to promote competition among search players. And I mean, for us, as we send traffic to search players, it's like 40% of our revenue. More competition for that type of traffic, I mean, that is a positive. So that we like. Our relationship with Google, though, has been, I think it's about 20 years, very long term. Quite close partnership, closer than maybe you'd think in terms of, like, product syncs and opportunities. We are a small player, who can act quite fast. So we integrate some of their technology in our products, like Gemini and the AI assistant. Yeah. So I'm sure we'll talk about it. And, you know, be seen as a fast mover, essentially, I think also within Google. Okay, understood. Let's pivot to AI. That's obviously been one of the biggest themes around the conference. Maybe you could walk us through a little bit of what you've built around Aria, AI integration with your flagship browser, and what you're seeing from consumer adoption so far, and how to think about some of the long-term strategy around AI? Yeah. We think that's a super exciting area as well. I guess a lot of people are saying that in this conference. But I can say, so what we do, just to explain that, is within the Opera browsers, there is an AI assistant called Aria, like an opera piece, right? Where we don't develop the underlying large language models. We work with OpenAI, and we work with Google for that. And then we have our own technical overlay that combines these models, pulls other sources, allows the AI assistant to be informed about the website that you're on, et cetera, so you can have a contextualized good answer. And then for the user, that stuff is free. And so the benefit we have compared to, like a non-browser AI platform, is that we are not a website, right? We are the tool used to get to those websites. So we can exist on top of any website. It can be proactive, it can remind you, so I can summarize this, or I can do this. It can. You can have a conversation about the AI, about the website that you are on right there and then. So we think, as a concept, we are extremely excited about what we do on Aria. We talked quite a lot about it. Because we see that how these tools can make the web experience better for people, like faster to process data, find data, even create things, right? But we also recognize it will take time. So I think on the other end of it, like, one of the lessons I think we have learned over the past year, is that for users to change their habit, that takes longer. So what we see is that the people who start to use that assistant, they spend more time in our product, they even search more on Google, they show better retention. So it's like, it's a great tool for us, but it's still, the adoption is slower than what at least I had expected. Takes longer to build it up, and I notice it even on myself, that, it's such a muscle memory. If I wonder something, I search for it. Yeah. Then I think, like, "Oh, shit, we even have our own AI assist." I go and ask that just now, like, we talked about the League of Legends game, right? Yeah. How many people watched that tournament? Excellent, Aria, like, how many people watched that last year? You know, just to refresh my memory. You get, like, all the stats. Yep. I think very useful, good to exist on top, and something that will continue to be very of strategic importance to us. Okay. Maybe just last one on AI, just to sort of follow it up. Earlier this year, you announced the green energy AI data cluster in Iceland to support your AI ambitions. Can we talk a little bit about your current infrastructure footprint, and how you see it evolving in an AI, maybe an AI-first world? I think, we have data centers across the world. They are both in Europe to North America, both U.S. and Canada, Africa, Asia, et cetera, Singapore. So setting up, an NVIDIA, like H100-based cluster in Iceland is not new to us. Here we have the benefit that latency is slightly less critical compared to most like kinda, cloud services, so we could use Iceland with the, you know, green, cheap electricity and cooling. I guess, they just open the window. Yeah. So it's a good place to be. That allows us to run that in-house, just like we do with everything else- like compression and own rendering, et cetera, at a fraction of the cost of what it costs to do it externally. Got it. So that's the logic. And then we've sort of created a starting point that we can scale within. We used cash for it, just because, you know, we still monetize the users, but it's still quite early days, so we wanted to just have that as a baseline. And then, as that scales in the business case, you know, we might probably would use our own cash if we would scale it. Okay. You talked earlier about gaming as a vertical for you guys. Maybe talk a little bit about the long-term strategy with respect to GX, your gaming focus browser. You know, how to think about it as a tailwind for user growth, for monetization longer term. How do you think about that evolving against that broader landscape? The GX space and the GX opportunity? I think for now, it's 10% of our user base. It's monetizing well above the average. Even like for like PC browser to PC GX user is monetizing well, you know, ahead. Even though it under indexes on, for example, advertising revenue, just it's not so. We haven't prioritized monetization as much on GX. It's just search in the beginning was 100% of the monetization. Very simple, and it was a plug-and-play, and already the best one. I think ahead we see. I mean, there's 30 million Opera GX users out of hundreds of millions of potential gamer targets. So, and what we see also is that product is ranked very high. People rate it high, they use it for a long time, high engagement, et cetera. So we can only sort of conclude that our focus here has to be to raise awareness, and more gamers learn about this product. And so that's what we do. We invest in sort of building the brand, raising awareness. We work with YouTubers, influencers, League of Legends, and type of partnerships, et cetera, to be visible and then to build a brand. So, looking out over what might be the biggest growth driver, it's really just about top of funnel, brand awareness, bottom of funnel, sort of usage, adoption, and sort of somewhere in between, driving overall awareness inside the gaming community of the opportunity. Yeah, making people aware, and then I think being present at that good time when people are like, "Okay, I'll try that." Right? "Okay, I'll go through the, you know, import my bookmarks and change," you know, "give it a go." And, you know, we think we are doing well on that. The people that have gone through it really like it, so then we just have to spread that, because 30 million amongst global gamers is still... You know, it still feels like relatively early days for that product- to us. Maybe shifting to the investments in the margin side of the equation. You know, when you think about balancing investments, delivering on certain levels of profitability, how do you think about striking a balance between those two, making sure you get the right level of money invested in the growth side of the equation, versus continuing to evolve and develop, and improve the margin trajectory in the business over the medium to long term? ... Always sort of an ongoing assessment. We do have the benefit that, like, nearly 30% of our revenue is spent on completely discretionary marketing costs, right? So that means that we actually have that ability to set, okay, how much do you invest in growth versus how do we optimize for the margin, et cetera. And then we try to just go by whatever is the best for the business long term, while still considering the need for profitability as if it was our own personal company, you know? So I think we tick up on EBITDA margins, but we still deliver, you know, 17% growth this year. And very proud to be, you know, we convert EBITDA to cash flow in a pretty good manner, in a quite transparent way for people to sort of follow and proud to be a dividend-paying growth tech company, because I realize there's not that many of us. So to have a dividend, I guess, our dividend yield is close to 6% On a 17% revenue growth kind of business. So yeah, so that we are proud about. But okay, so always ongoing. I think when we look ahead, we do want to invest in growth. We will keep doing that, but kinda probably not unreasonable to expect sort of similar to as we entered this year, that we commented that we expect margins to keep sort of expanding little by little on the net. Yeah. As a reasonable expectation relative to sort of economies of scale, pulling it in one end, and being in a super strategic point in time where the browser is so relevant, and these AI opportunities and the gaming opportunities, it's just also a lot to go after investment-wise. Okay. So just sticking with that last point there, when you think about your investment priorities currently, how you've articulated them, what would you say are the top three investment priorities that are garnering an additional dollar of capital inside the business? I would highlight Western user bases in general. We are coming out with a new version of Opera One. It's called R2. You can try it in Developer Build online, but that's coming out this fall. It's Opera GX, so as we just talked about but it's still early stage, super well monetized. And then I would say Opera iOS. Opportunities in iOS, in Europe, in particular, to sort of use the momentum that we have there to sort of start building that base. Okay. When you think about marketing investments in the business, you know, how have the channels in which you've invested dollars on the marketing side evolved as a company over the last couple of years? What are your key learnings about which channels typically deliver higher ROI to you versus lower ROI, and how do you think about striking a balance to optimize for ROI in your marketing spend? I would say how the spend evolves is, of course, we move more spend towards the areas that we want to grow in, so we want to focus on this high ARPU. You know, even though Western is 17% of our user base, it's close to 70% of our marketing spend. Yep. Got it. So we do invest in that. That also has some consequences on the type of campaigns we run, so we do, I think, more than before, brand building, awareness raising, because reaching the right audiences in the U.S. and key European countries, hundreds of influencers that we work with on a monthly basis, it's a sort of a symbiosis, right? Because we give content makers something to talk about. Yeah. Like, it's a very quickly inflow of features into the product, et cetera, which can be interesting for them to cover, and then, of course, we benefit from the awareness that generates. Yeah. Maybe less spend on OEMs and telcos, or at least less percent of the total, I would say, because that's less relevant in Western markets. Okay. Understood. Maybe turning next to capital allocation. You talked a little bit earlier about paying a dividend. When you talk about the priorities for your capital, both investing in the business, potentially doing M&A or returning capital to shareholders, talk a little bit about how your strategic imperatives around capital have evolved in the last couple of years, and what your current priorities are in terms of striking balance around capital? Yeah. I think over the years, we have shown to be quite active, so we do generate good revenue, good profitability, et cetera. And I think we highlight that since 2020, we've used over $400 million on returning to shareholders, either through, I guess we've done all. Like, we've done special dividend, we are doing a recurring dividend, and we've done buybacks, both in the market, and we bought out a pre-IPO shareholder. So I think we've been active on that front and sort of shown that we do all of them. Yeah. We've talked about the recurring dividend as our main avenue of returning funds to shareholders now, just because we look at the free float of the company. When we went public, we had a free float of 9%. Then by the end of 2020, like, when I start my math here, it was sixteen, and now it's 28%. So it's sort of moving in the right direction. But then, of course, I really liked when we bought back a pre-IPO shareholder that was not part of the free float. Yep. Both it was a great deal, and the free float and percent of the company just overnight increased. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Okay, so that's your priorities going forward. Okay. We've talked a lot about growth, and where you wanna take the platform over the medium to long term, and the role of competition and opening up can play. Talk a little bit about the vision for the company and bring it all together. So we're sitting here, second half of twenty twenty-four, when you think about where the company is going over the next twelve, eighteen, twenty-four months, maybe put a finer point to, bring the conversation home on key priorities for growth, how you're aligning investments against it, and how to think about the vision from the leadership of the company of where you wanna be and what you're sort of skating after in terms of a long-term opportunity. Okay. So also a broad question So I'll try to break it down as my head works. Finance-wise, I just this year, we broke $400 million. So if I think about revenue, and sort of we're on track to exceed the $500 million revenue milestone next year by a good margin. I think that will be a milestone for us. And while we you know tick up on our margin picture as what we expect, maybe more interesting on like the platform on our offering, I think both it will be a very active twelve months. We always feel that way, but also now we feel that the product lineup we have and the partner lineup we have is the most exciting it's ever been. Yep. We feel that we benefit from, like, a broader industry appreciation of the browser, like you talked about the DOJ, like the appreciation of the value of the traffic that a browser, in that case, sends to a search engine. But then we also experience e-commerce, other types of verticals appreciating us, right? So I think the lineup we have on the product side, with the new Opera One, the new Aria functionalities, the Opera GX, partnership broadening, that I think will be, if you think about what's important over the next twelve months, I think sort of these product releases to sort of still stay ahead of the curve and still have good reasons for people to, you know, to switch away the system default and try Opera will be important. And then on the partnership side, like we talked a bit on our last earnings call, about how e-commerce and other players sort of find us now to be big enough in key markets like the U.S., that we integrate directly and create sort of opportunities for us to drive high purchase intent traffic directly to a partner without any intermediaries, and based on our own ability to see, like, who'd be in the market for certain type of product or service, et cetera. I think that part of the offering is exciting, both on its own, because, you know, financially speaking, it's very attractive, and it's sort of how that can then again lead us to be able to scale even faster than what we had thought. So the product. Company-wise, it's thirty years. Next year, we're a year out of the 30th anniversary, and I think we'll measure our success that we still keep the team energized and, you know, like that hungry start-up feeling that we do well. It's sort of letting people make their own Opera internally, so a continued high energy, I hope to be able to report also a year from now. Okay. Yeah. All right, well, that's all great stuff that we can think about in terms of coming over the next 12, 18, 24 months. Really enjoyed the conversation, and thanks for being part of the conference this year.