Great. We're on the clock, so we'll get started here. My name is Ron Josey. I cover the internet sector here at Citi. I'm very happy today to be with us, Frode Jacobsen, who's the CFO of Opera. I think we all know what Opera does. Opera has a portfolio of browsers and a ton of other products from a payments perspective and just everything under the sun and multiple secular tailwinds from a global basis as well, whether in every region, but in particular in North America. I think the one thing for me on Opera is the 289 million global monthly active users. You say that number, there aren't that many companies with that much scale. There's a lot to go through here. It was a very busy week from a news flow. Frode, thank you for joining us today. I'm glad to have you. Thanks for having us. Yeah. Before we get into news flow, I want to lay the foundation here. Just talk to us a little bit more about Opera, the product portfolio across. We talked earlier about browsers, payments, other products. Talk to us about the product portfolio and the go-to-market. Yeah, I mean, you already introduced it pretty well. Oh, well. We've been around. It's a Norwegian company originally, quite global today. It's been around for 30 years. It started out competing with Netscape, essentially. I think, as you said, we built up to become a quite sizable challenger, with competition being mainly browsers that belong to operating systems like Google, Microsoft, Apple. I think we've shown that there definitely is a segment of people who like to have something non-default. We've created a portfolio of browsers to cater to different needs. I'm sure we'll get back to sort of the more news flow. I can go back on that. We can talk about it now. That's very topical. Happy to jump in. That's the business. Size-wise, in case you're new to the story, we're guiding close to $600 million of revenue this year, $130 million, $140 million just to leave it a good cash flow. We're guiding to growth at about 23% through multiple years of growth. We've been a rule of 40 company, I think, for the past 16, 17 quarters. We try to balance growth and profitability. We use our cash flow to actually pay dividends, which I think is maybe a little bit unusual for sort of tech growth companies. That's great. Yeah, it's a good overview. OK, so 289 million monthly active users. Browsers are a big part. We talked about starting competing with Netscape. For us old folks up on stage, i.e. me, I remember Netscape very well. All right, big news earlier this week. Google is a partner of yours. You've been a partner for 25 years. Yeah. That's right. The big news is, and then I think Google is around 1/3 of total revenue in terms of your partnership from a tech. I'll just keep it open-ended. Would love your thoughts on the news that came out this week on the remedies. I mean, what was most relevant to us as a browser company was this question: would Google be allowed to essentially pay for traffic, which is a little funny anecdote. I think it was Opera was the first browser to actually natively integrate search, kind of proposing to Google, like, hey, what if we just make it so that people, if they type a search query and hit Enter, we send them to you? I think they thought it was a good idea, and that's how that all started. I'm still waiting for the thank you card from Apple. It would have been very surprising if somehow Google would not be allowed to pay for traffic when the competition is just heating up, like that Bing would be allowed to, Perplexity and ChatGPT and Claude would be allowed to pay for traffic, but somehow not Google. I think the remedies that came out on Tuesday with sort of not limiting that was kind of not so surprising to us in a sense. Though exclusivity is no longer part of it. Yeah, well, I think our agreements with Google are very compatible with sort of what came out in that ruling. It's not so much about exclusivity for us. I mean, we appreciate the ruling because it allows us the freedom to choose the partners that we want. I think right now it's just the fact that Google is the best at monetizing traffic. I am a user of all the other platforms, right? Yeah. I pay them the $20 a month, all of them. The funny thing is they make the most money off me if I pay that $20 and not use them, whereas, of course, Google is much better at actually being a bit commercial in that sense. I think there are some other aspects of the ruling, like around the potential to do data sharing. The judge is clearly about promoting competition in the sort of information and product gathering space. If anything, if that rules competition as a browser, that is positive news for us, right? Our ability to make money depends on both the value of the traffic and the competition for that traffic. If more players out there are able to essentially generate revenue from search queries, you could call it that, right? Even though it's like an AI chat, then the better it is for the browser. Yeah, that's very helpful. We can get into more Q&A. I think that's a great place to sort of jump off into. We're always asked about the TAM for the browser market, the size, the scale, the strategic benefit, simply because it's hard to see maybe how browsers touch revenue. Obviously, browsers are the portal to the everything internet. Walk us through just on the browser market overall as you think about the TAM and then how you see it evolves over time. The next follow-up question, which we'll get, is just the competitive side, which you touched on. I think browser, it's getting a little bit more front of mind. I feel to be the application that most people spend most of their working day, it has had surprisingly little attention. Yeah. Maybe some of that is because most people use a browser that comes with operating systems. People focus more on Windows versus iOS or Android on mobile versus macOS, iOS. Now I think it's almost the economics are much more relevant within the browser than within the operating system. You don't shift so much between, you know, the operating system isn't really doing that much in terms of touching commercial points or touching product points, but the browser is. I think there's been more attention in this space lately also because these AI companies are talking about the importance of browser, which is sort of helpful to us because that just directs more eyeballs in sort of our direction, right? There aren't so many browser companies out there. I guess there's only one list of browser companies out there, and that is Opera. It's a good benchmark, I guess, for people to look at. I think that's been positive to us. I think we've been trying to say this since we went public in 2018, right, that this is actually a quite valuable piece of software because this is where hundreds and millions or in the market billions of people are going through to find information, buy products, make decisions, et c. I think our ability to generate revenue off sending traffic to partners is more visible now, perhaps. Yeah. We'll get to competition in a second. I want to focus on Opera here and the portfolio of products. Let's focus on browsers for now. There's multiple browsers within Opera. You have One, which is the key, I believe. Then we have Air, GX, Neon is coming out. Talk to us about the portfolio of products that are offered. Yeah. And we don't have to get through each one of those. Yeah. The portfolio of products is one. Trend-wise, where the technology is going as agentic browsers become the norm, et c. I think our strategy has always been, if we're going to be, we are an independent player in that space. We know that the landscape, like, it's stacked against us in the sense that when you buy a computer, it comes with a browser. If you buy a phone, it comes with a browser. We have always taken a very explicit strategy that our browser needs to be meaningfully different than whatever comes as default. If you are Chrome or Safari or Edge, you have to sort of cater to the grandparents and the kids and everyone, tech-savvy versus completely not, right? It has to be, it's very minimalistic and it's very basic. I think the opportunity we have had is to make products that are not for everyone, but target particular groups of people that we can identify, reach, communicate with, build a brand against that can appreciate. If it's like very tech-savvy people that appreciate sort of the very richer functionalities with, for example, Opera One, gamers with Opera GX, the newer product Opera Air, which is sort of like mindfulness, declutter, simplify kind of thing, and then Opera Neon, which will be the very AI-centric product. That's been a successful strategy. I think it's very different from the most well-known challenger in the U.S., which is Mozilla Firefox, which is they've taken the almost opposite strategy of looking a whole lot like Google Chrome. It's almost like, I mean, it's also viable. Like, we want to make Chrome for people who don't want to use Google. I'm sure that's not what they do. We have tried to stand out much more feature-wise and sort of the experience. Sure. With the advent of agentic browsing, so to speak, Neon is coming out here soon. It's out now, but maybe taking a more GA later this year. Just talk to us about some of the, you call it, functionalities or capabilities as browsing evolves with AI. Yeah. This is where we try to have AI play to our strengths. We're extremely excited about it. Opera Neon, we don't have our own large language model. We don't try to compete with Gemini, ChatGPT, Anthropic, those companies. We just benefit from the fact that we are an independent company. Our strength is we built browsers for 30 years. We have a team of people who are the smartest engineers in Opera work on browsers. That's what we have. That's really good. I think we're quite good at that. If you use Opera One, it's probably quite tailored to everyone here in the audience, sort of information workers needing to process a lot of information. You can sort of see that that's a, hopefully, you'll find it a different and more and a better experience. I think our strength is to use the power of LLMs as a natively integrated function in the browser. If you think about the, if you use ChatGPT or Claude or etc. today, they are a tab in your browser. They're in the window. That window doesn't know whatever else is going on in your browser. It can answer questions, give you facts. It's not really across everything you do. I think the benefit of natively having AI in the browser is that you lift it up one level to sort of exist across everything that you do and also being able to run essentially the tabs and the tasks for you in a different way than when it's just a website. Name is a real-time use case of that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, anything from, because what do you use in the browser? You have your email. Maybe you have your Teams and Slack instant messaging. You have your calendar. Obviously, you have all the various websites, for example. You could set up a team meeting with my direct report tomorrow to talk about this topic and include a summary in the meeting notes. The AI can find an available time for everyone and summarize whatever, put it in. All within the browser? Within the browser, yeah. You have your email tab up. You've got your Teams. Teams is a separate app, but you could also do it within the browser too. Yeah. For example, we in Opera, we use Slack. The AI will then create a Slack group with your direct reports. Let's say you had the DOJ versus Google 200-page ruling up. Summarize how this is relevant to us and send it to the team that's been studying that process and set up a meeting tomorrow to discuss any implications for us. They can be a very massive time saver, right? One of the things, when the product team goes through our plans for Opera Neon, they've looked at quite a lot of, we do a lot of work with our user base and the broader market. You have, it's more than a billion information workers worldwide, right? The fact that people go from this task to that task to that task creates these inefficiencies in your day. Yeah. I think if this product is done right, it can be a massive time saver for people. You get a lot of the simple stuff out of the way in terms of task management. It also lets you just keep the flow much more. Sure. We're coming out with Opera Neon this fall. We're very excited to release it. I hope when it comes out, that if you contrast it to, like, I don't know, Perplexity Comet, which is the alternative that's out right now, you'll see that it bears the mark of a company that has much more experience in making a browser and therefore maybe have some interesting thoughts on how AI can be helpful within the routines and the muscle memory of how people actually work. As we think about the multi-browser strategy within Opera, talk to us, Frode, about how we can use the best use cases of Neon into One, into GX, into Air, and how we bring the product portfolio together. Yeah, because Neon is made to, it's most likely going to be a paid product. That's where we're going to put the richest features, which is the most compute intensive. I think over, so we already have, you would say, AI in all our products. We have a built-in assistant that we call Aria. It sort of exists in the browser interface, but doing many of the same things as a normal AI service would do. Maybe links a bit more to products. We try to, you know, we set it up in a way that we can monetize it. I think as computing costs come down, as we learn how we can monetize best that type of traffic, because it is interesting also from a revenue point of view that we are moving in this direction of an agent in the browser helping the user out. As that relates to, I mean, there's not so much money in summarizing the ruling and calling up the team. When you talk about your vacation plans or things you need to buy, et c., right, of course, you can generate revenue share from that, from making the purchases with your partner base, etc. I think as we see how the user monetization evolves and sort of there's sort of a line of that versus cost, it can get broader and broader. Yeah, that's great. We all look forward to Neon launching and to seeing how the broader market evolves here. We can get more on the competition side. I want to also dive a little more deeper into the operations of the business here. We've already talked about Google, but we haven't really talked about the partnership with Google and just the visibility that comes with a 25-year relationship, I think. Just talk to us about the term, as much as you can, the terms or the duration of the relationships every three years, but you have 1+ year renewal cycle. Any insights around those would be very helpful. Yeah. As you mentioned, it's entering the 25th year now that we have been consistently in a partnership with Google, where we sell traffic and get a revenue share in exchange. We've typically had three-year agreements. Google has had an option to extend the fourth year on the same terms without renegotiation. That's the year we're in now. Earlier this year, they asked if we should just keep extending like that, which is now finally very compatible with the ruling. I think the only change is that the default would be a one-year contract, as opposed to our history being to do this every third year. The option was for Google to extend at the same term because we always try to do well in those negotiations. For us, this doesn't really change very much. It's not like we see them every three years. We see them on a very frequent basis because it's a partnership across traffic, technology, sort of how the browser evolves, how their services are integrated. We work with Gemini, which is one of the language models that we use in Aria. It's interesting for us to use that in Neon as well, right? I think it's probably interesting to Google too because everything they put in Chrome is probably not scary to them. It's huge, right? It's like billions of people. Of course, I'm assuming it's interesting to these LLM players to see how things work also with partners like Opera. You talked about Gemini as one of the language models. How are you using LLMs overall? Which ones? I think we are independent. We don't have any, we're a very pragmatic company. Depending on the use case, which model works best, on some, you can maybe use some open source models. We can run it in our own data center on something that's more language quality. It's maybe in more open. The detail of how we do the mix, the point is that we do a mix, and the user doesn't really have to know or have to give input on it. We will let the user. Let's talk about the user. To a certain extent, Western MAU has been a focus here for the past couple of years. I think overall, the MAUs are doing what they're doing. Higher monetizable Western MAUs are still seeing growth here. Just talk to us on the products and features and really the go-to-market to build that Western presence overall. Western is defined as U.S., Europe, but then also several other countries. Yeah. I mean, we try to find good ways to explain our strategy in simple terms because we are still a relatively small company. What we have been focusing on is the highest potential user base. What we have de-focused on, in particular, have been feature phone users in emerging markets, which has, at some point, I think we had 70 million feature phone users in Africa and Asia. There wasn't really much revenue associated with it. We focused marketing in the higher regions. That's where we have been growing. The overall base has been quite stable. It's gone a bit down in totality. The net there is feature phone user growth. When we have had fewer users in Africa and Asia, we have had equally many new users in the U.S. and Europe, essentially, which is very good revenue-wise and what we have focused on. What we are doing is we're making products that we think will do well with the most demanding, highest ARPU potential users, whether it's because people live in rich countries like this one or Norway or like Europe or because they are in, let's say, segments like gamers, the Opera GX browser for gamers. What we see is that, of course, there's a big difference between the average ARPU of an American and a Kenyan, let's say. If you're a gamer, if you have the setup with the whole gaming PC and the neon lights and the gaming chair and all of that, the difference is less. It's still a difference, but it's less because then you're more affluent if you're in an emerging market and you are in that group. We've been focusing on that. I think we've quadrupled the ARPU, tripled at least the ARPU over the past four years. We've grown the Western user base by close to 30% over the past four years. I think we've been successful at it. It's fortunate that we did it because the AI changes that are happening now and all the opportunities that come with that is very, it comes at a certain cost, a certain monthly price point, et c., where I think that user base is much more susceptible to that than the average global mix, let's say. From an advertising, how is awareness of the browser? We often try to do our studies about awareness. Opera is an emerging brand here. Talk to us how we build up awareness in these Western U.S. and Europe, we'll call it. Yeah. No, we spend close to 30% of our revenue on marketing and brand building. It's a quite wide list of initiatives. It goes from working with people like YouTubers, influencers in the space, for example, or now with the well-being. Just to introduce it in people's awareness that we exist, that's like number one. If you take the gaming browser, it's like great reviews, very high retention, and then we have like 33 million users, which is good. It's by far the highest ARPU products we have. There are hundreds of millions of gamers, right? If they all love it so much and the retention rate is so good, our job is to make more people sort of aware and sort of consider it and give it a try. The foundation is to build an awareness and a brand identity. On top of it, we can do the more tactical ad, click, download kind of things. The ROI on that is much better if the audience that you go after has some sort of affiliation with the product to begin with. Yeah. Are there any newer channels that the team has focused on, whether it's social, search, of course? Or you talked about influencers. Maybe Twitch is it for the GX browser. Any insights there? I think we are quite present in all these, maybe not social media, or social media too. Like our X account is very active, for example. Another aspect is tech media. For example, Opera One goes after people who are a little bit interested in technology, et c. I think you'll see if you ever read a press release that we say something like we launched something. If you try to Google it, you'll see like 100 tech sites already talking about it. We're quite good at working with journalists in the space. We gather them twice per year to show them the latest things. They can get some early access. We can sort of prep it a little bit so that they are aware. Analysts enjoy early access too. Yeah, yeah. Keep it noted. Noted. We try to do that because, I mean, the outlets of where people find information. One good thing about not going after the grandparents and the 12-year-olds, but going after very specific groups, is that for a large part, you know where to find them. Yeah. You don't have to go to TV. Everyone's very expensive. You can go to gaming sites, and you can work with PewDiePie and MrBeast and the people that are actually watched by that segment and promoted. Very helpful. That's a very good deeper dive in browsers on Google, on MAU, the other side of the business. It's now about 2/3 of revenue. That's the actual advertising side outside of Google. Would love to hear more thoughts. Business. I'll tack on to that. Approach visibility, e-commerce has been a home run here more recently. Drivers. Yeah. I Yeah. I mean, I think when we went public, we had something like 70% or 80% of our revenue was search. That has grown since then, but advertising has just grown so much faster because, I mean, search was the original monetization. I think we, as I mentioned before, kind of came up with it. Sure. And then, advertising, we began by we promote some partners. They can click an icon, the user, and we collect a web share or we had a monthly fixed fee to be there, kind of thing. That's evolved a lot. We have many more partnerships. We have content in the browser, which is personalized, and we can show normal ads. We started targeting, so not presenting everyone with the same, but essentially looking at we have an advantage on that, right, because we see what people are doing. We have a chance to show them relevant things. We even use that to target people outside the Opera browser through our Opera Ads Network, which is getting quite big. That's been an evolution. That's why the advertising revenue stream has grown so much faster and become now 2/3 of revenue instead of a minority. I mean, of course, it's all, in a sense, the same. It's about also consider it as we look ahead, right? We talk about what's the future of search and AI. The search industry, I mean, it's an expression of the revenue we generate when the user is actually looking for something, right? They are typing in something they are looking for. The future is saying if partners do answer their queries and direct them to certain products. That's user-initiated. Advertising can be more like, oh, yeah, I was looking at memory from a game yesterday. More playful. Yeah, you remind me. I clicked that, right? It's a bit different, right? I think both revenue streams will be important going forward. Actually, search revenue stream or sort of the user-initiated, like we can, where it's almost like we're coming to a point where what we're advertising was six, seven years ago, like the search opportunity could kind of come back into that because now we're going to take a much more active role because overall, I believe, it makes it very large. Any specific callouts to make? We can tie it back to the product strategy or the geographic strategy of before. More interesting partner through e-commerce buyers. It makes. It just kind of took off, and it's been growing at more than 100% year- over- year now for an accelerated about a year ago. Mid last year was when we really started to scale it. On for some time before that, and it's been very nice to see it play out. Yeah. You asked about visibility, etc. In our history as a public company, I think we've never missed revenue guidance. We missed EBITDA guidance one time when COVID hit, Q1 2020. Other than that, it's always been meet or exceed. At least that's a good proof of what I'm about to say, which is that since our revenue is generated by billions of queries, billions of clicks, views, et c., it's numbers that there is a good degree of predictability into that. As we run, for example, marketing campaigns, as I mentioned, it's our biggest OpEx category. We know within a few days what's the ROI in a certain campaign because we see the profile of the users that are coming in by country. We see the engagement, the daily, the clicks, et c. We can very quickly sort of calculate that curve for the next two years on that segment and look at it compared to the money that we spent to drive that. We look at the organic uplift of, OK, we got these people clicked. Then we rose in the rankings, and we got some extra. What's the incremental value? As a BI team at Opera and sort of the FNA, it's a great place to be because you have such vast amounts of data that you can actually be quite good at predicting. Having said that, I think we've had the positive problem of having a particular e-commerce scale so quickly that we didn't dare to guide what it looked like just because when something is that new and growing that fast, then it's big numbers or not, it becomes more difficult. Makes sense. Yeah. Makes perfect sense. We have about a minute or two left. Any questions in the audience? Yes? I was curious. There's a mic right behind you. Hopefully, it's on. Yeah. Earlier, you mentioned a billion knowledge users doing work in the browser all the time. I think that's not lost in enterprise software too. Atlassian just announced the acquisition of The Browser Company, has two different browsers. I guess the angle there is just secure, more enterprise oriented. Can you talk about sort of differentiated offerings for enterprise specifically? How do you tap into that? If you're familiar with The Browser Company, how is that different than sort of what you can offer in the enterprise? Yeah. We have operated for the past, yeah, more than a decade as a very B2C-oriented business. We monetize the user base we have, and that's how we generate revenue. Our history is actually B2B with operators and sort of payments, et c., if you go way, way back. I think the products we are making, like Opera Neon, is made to appeal to the knowledge worker. That might open up some opportunities. We're not really running those calculations. Of course, if everyone loves this product, like we should have that on our, you know, like that can be interesting. For now, we want to get the product out. We want to see how it works. Of course, I realize it's the first iteration. I certainly hope people will recognize the difference between that and the part of a company that's just launching their first browser. Sure. In terms of that acquisition, I mean, I guess they started out as very tech savvy people and got a good following on that. As they said themselves, it was very hard to scale. We don't really see them pop up in stat count or anything in terms of, so maybe they have less than 0.1% market share if that's as low as it goes. It's still a small company. It was clearly acquired because of interest in the technology and that space. We could be about the same multiples. We would happily do that. Do you have the compliance and security features? Is that something you guys are doing? We're in overtime. I sort of have to, that's OK, it's quick. We can follow up in the hall or. I'm not familiar with how they distinguish themselves from us. I mean, we're a Norwegian European company operating under the European rules for privacy and all of that. I think on that front, we're probably quite good. Frode, we didn't get to talk about payments or about profitability or about a lot. There's a lot going on. Thank you for joining us today. Looking forward to testing Opera Neon. Yeah. All right. Thanks. Thank you.