Opera at Goldman Sachs Conference: AI-Driven Growth Strategy

On Monday, 08 September 2025, Opera Ltd (NASDAQ:OPRA) presented at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025. CFO Frode Jacobsen outlined Opera’s strategic focus on AI integration, expansion in Western and Asian markets, and shareholder returns. While the company is optimistic about its innovative browser technology, it also faces the challenge of competing with industry giants.

Key Takeaways

• Opera plans to launch Opera Neon, an AI-native browser, this fall.
• The company has seen a significant increase in iOS users in the EU due to the Digital Markets Act.
• Opera is focusing on high-value users and expanding in Asian gaming markets.
• Nearly $500 million has been returned to shareholders since 2020.
• Opera’s revenue growth is guided at 23% for the current year.

Financial Results

• Annual revenue is close to $600 million with a 23% growth expectation.
• EBITDA margin aligns with revenue growth at approximately 23%.
• Western market users now account for 20% of the user base, up from 6-7%.
• Average revenue per user (ARPU) has tripled over four years.
• Opera GX contributes about 20% of total revenue, with an ARPU of $3.50.

Operational Updates

• Continued focus on expanding the user base in North America and Europe.
• Significant user growth in the EU following the Digital Markets Act.
• Long-standing partnership with Google for search revenue.
• Early AI integration in Opera One and other browsers.
• Opera Neon will enhance user workflows with AI, launching this fall.

Future Outlook

• Prioritizing high-value users in Western markets.
• Expanding Opera GX in Asian gaming markets, particularly Japan and South Korea.
• Leveraging AI to improve user productivity and browser functionality.
• Opera aims to prove the value of its well-designed browser, Opera Neon.

Q&A Highlights

• Positive impact from the EU Digital Markets Act on iOS user acquisition.
• Stable relationship with Google despite regulatory changes.
• AI investments include partnerships with Google and OpenAI.
• Preference for dividends as a method of returning value to shareholders, with opportunistic buybacks.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for more detailed insights.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025:

Unidentified speaker: This one’s streaming, or?

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: Yeah.

Unidentified speaker: All right. I think in the interest of time, we’re going to get started with our next one. It’s my pleasure to have the team from Opera here today at the conference, Frode Jacobsen, CFO. Frode, thank you so much for being part of the conference.

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: Thanks for having us.

Unidentified speaker: For those who are less familiar with Opera, why don’t you start with taking a step back and giving a little bit of an overview of the platform that’s being built, the evolution you guys have been on from the product side, and sort of the vision going forward?

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: Sure. I mean, Opera’s been around for 30 years. We still act like we are a startup, and it still feels like we are a startup. It’s a Norwegian company from the 1990s. It started out as a Netscape competitor, or Netscape became ours, I don’t know. We make web browsers for computers, for phones, an independent player in that space. We built up a user base of close to 300 million monthly users, both in emerging markets, but also where we grow the most is in the Western markets. We have browsers that are tailored for they’re made to be different than what comes with a computer or what comes with a phone, more feature-rich, tailored to specific segments. We have a browser for gamers. Company-wise, close to $600 million revenue, 23% midpoint guidance for growth this year. I think EBITDA margin, the same percentage.

We’ve had a nice track record of good growth for many years. It’s in a very exciting space.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, all true. Yeah, agree. I want to break that down a little bit, though. If you think about the user base you have, is there a way to break down by either product or geography or demographic? How do you think about who your user base is across the array of products you try to bring to market?

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: If we begin with geographies, we have about 20% of the user base in what we call Western markets. North America, the European, the developed, those countries. That’s up from 6% to 7% of the base when we started really focusing on building that, and much higher monetization. That’s been fueling our revenue growth and ARPU growth. It’s like 3x over the past four years. In terms of types of users, probably the typical Opera user of Opera One, for example, a flagship product, is probably a bit more tech-savvy than the average person. They care more. They know that they can install a browser that’s not the one that came with the device, and they appreciate the richer feature set. We don’t have to make a product that works for both grandparents and grandchildren, and we can make something that’s appreciated a lot by some.

We have a gamer browser, the only one in the world, I think, that exists.

Unidentified speaker: I started as an avid user. My gaming 18-year-old son is an avid user, yes.

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: Yes, yes, very good. That’s the perfect target audience for that. We have over 30 million users. It’s a very highly rated product, the highest ARPU product we have. It’s obviously a very lucrative segment of people that are happy to make online purchases, and that drives revenue to us.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, understood. How could that mix evolve over time? When you think about the landscape evolving or your product set evolving, what might that mix look like in three to five years’ time?

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: We’re still investing in the trends of we focus on high-value potential users more than the absolute user number. For example, if you take the regional split, I think we still spend 80% to 90% of our marketing dollars on that type of user growth, and it still represents less than that in terms of our revenue mix. We are still cultivating the continuation of that trend, which I think, especially now with the inflow of AI opportunities, including in the browser itself, with more computing on the back end, et cetera, but also much more opportunities on revenue generation, is a very good place to be. That’s what we’ll keep doing.

Unidentified speaker: OK. Over the last sort of 6 to 12 months, there’s been two sort of interesting developments. The first one I want to talk about is the EU competitive landscape. Obviously, there were changes made with the Digital Markets Act. I wanted to understand better how that impacted your business, what kind of market opportunity it opened up, and what have you seen in the European Union since some of those regulatory actions?

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: Yeah, both in the EU and in the U.S., I think we’ve seen government bodies focus on promoting competition. As an independent player among giants, we tend to be very happy with that and appreciate those types of things to level the playing field. We’re also not naive in the sense that we are still a challenger, and we still have to win our users, and we still have to innovate faster than the big system OS players to get users to download us. In the EU, one outcome was that also on iPhones, people were given the choice of which browser they want to use. Every time you buy a new iPhone in the EU, you’re asked that. That already exists on Android. We saw from a low starting point, we’ve been focusing on Android as the platform that we had the greatest chance to compete.

Still, more or less overnight, we saw a doubling in the inflow of new iOS users to Opera in the EU. It’s a step in a positive direction for us.

Unidentified speaker: Right. Do you think that’ll be an area where you continue to invest time and effort over time, that if you see these regulatory sort of pro-competition rulings come, that you’ll sort of lean in from the investment side?

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: I think there isn’t, we still have to work for it, kind of. We don’t get anything for free. In the case of Apple, for example, for the longest time, iOS was locked. You had to use Safari as your default browser. That has opened up. People are informed about the alternatives. The next one will be that we can use our own rendering technology. That gets very technical. That is possible on Android, and that is why we focused on Android as the platform with the biggest opportunity. Now we see it’s moving in the right direction on iOS. The best-case scenario is our TAM is twice as big. Yes, we are investing in growing iOS in Europe as a consequence.

Unidentified speaker: Got it. OK. You’ve also talked about the U.S. You have a current working relationship with Google on the search revenue side. For those who are a little bit less familiar, why don’t you talk a little bit about that relationship between Google and yourself? There’s been a number of regulatory rulings with respect to search recently in the U.S. as well.

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: Yeah, the relationship dates back 25 years. For 25 years, we’ve consistently been in a partnership setup with Google as our preferred search partner. The way it works is the same as Apple generates Google revenues, that we have users typing in a search in the address bar or in the search box, and we send that to Google, and we get a revenue share in exchange for the traffic. There’s been a case between the U.S. Department of Justice and Google about search distribution. The only part of it that was directly relevant to us was if somehow Google would be prohibited to pay for traffic. It came out that they wouldn’t be in the ruling.

It would have been very strange now that all these AI players are heating up and Bing is growing, if somehow one player, Google, would not be allowed to compete for traffic and all the other ones would be. It was maybe not so surprising. It was relevant for the U.S. part of our user base, so the smaller part, but still good to get clarity on that, I think.

Unidentified speaker: To put a fine point on this, as a result of that ruling, is your interpretation that very little, if anything, will change with the relationship you have with Google today, the way it’s structured?

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: Correct. We operate, we’ve been extending our contract yearly. That was one of the things that came in the ruling, that there should be annual contracts. We don’t operate with exclusivity. That was another part of it. I think in practical terms, this doesn’t really alter our relationship with Google.

Unidentified speaker: OK, understood. I want to pivot to artificial intelligence. Why don’t you talk us through what you built around ARIA and AI integration into the browser? I think there’s a lot of technology investors that believe the next big secular theme is going to be AI infused into browser experience and sort of how that changes consumer habits over time.

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: Yeah, it’s an example of we tend to be very quick at adopting new opportunities and coming up with innovation ourselves. In line with this, we have to give people a reason to use Opera. They have to appreciate the technology of Opera. Very early on, we built in AI functionality in the browser, meaning that you could essentially chat with an agent. We worked with both Google and OpenAI on the back end. You can have a native chat in the browser. You can make it aware of what website you’re on, ask questions about that. You can also command certain browser features, etc. That’s been an early implementation of AI that we rolled out in Opera One, the flagship browser, and it’s now available in all our browsers. That was step one. You probably have questions about Opera Neon, which is this AI-native browser we’re coming out with.

Maybe I’ll pause there.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, obviously, that was the big announcement on this last earnings call. I thought that was sort of the splashy new change in terms of the narrative overall. Why don’t you talk a little bit about that shift? What was the genesis of going down this road? Obviously, we’re going to get more information about that as the year progresses and into 2026. Set the table for us on where that might take the company.

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: We think we are so excited about it. We’re coming out with a new browser this fall. We’re just wrapping it up and getting it ready for a release called Opera Neon. Maybe to introduce it, I’ll say that I’m using all of these AI services. I’m paying $20 to all of them every month.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, me too.

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: I use them for different things. I have ideas in my head about what they’re all best for, et cetera. They’re all websites, right? They are a website, and I have excellent dialogues with them, and I get information, and it makes me effective. It is constrained to that dialogue. If I close that tab, it’s gone. None of them are aware of what else I’m doing, right? What we find so exciting as a browser maker is to elevate the AI functionality, let’s say, above the tabs to be native in the browser itself at a level where it can actually control your tabs and interact with your websites and perform actions for you on the internet. It will be a combination of local and cloud-powered.

It exists at the same level as the person using the browser, meaning that when you are logged into your email, your calendar, your Wall Street Journal and Economist subscription, and all of that, your agent in Opera Neon has access to those things. That enables you to essentially create summaries and information from websites that are not crawlable from a big LLM that is central. You can research information. You can have the agent then summarize that, share it with your team through your email, set up a meeting through your calendar, and get stuff done, like the tedious stuff handled. I think our benefit, we’re not the only ones that are thinking about this. I think our benefit relative to some of the owners of the LLMs themselves is that we don’t try to compete at the level of the LLM. We’ll use partners’ models on that.

We have decades’ worth of experience in making a really unique, high-quality browser. We know how people use browsers, how they work with tabs, how they structure their tasks. We want to create something that fits with the existing flow of how people actually work online, but assists it and speeds it up.

Unidentified speaker: Got it. Understood. OK. You referenced there sort of what you build versus what you partner. You’ve talked about making targeted investments in the AI infrastructure on the CapEx side of the equation. Talk a little bit about what that landscape looks like. Where would there be avenues of exploring AI where you would partner, sounds like, on the foundational model side? What do you feel the need to sort of invest in and own and operate yourself?

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: We’ll play to our strengths, which is to make a really good browser. The slight differences between models in terms of how you can structure a task in the browser and execute a command is not so critical in what we believe is our success formula. In terms of investment and the computing behind that, what can be done locally on the device will actually run it locally, not in the cloud. We have our own hosting infrastructure where we can run our own models. We partner with Google for Gemini, OpenAI, and others on the back end where that is useful. We want to give the user also control over where their queries are being processed. That’s our setup. I don’t know if that answers.

Unidentified speaker: No, it does. That’s helpful. In terms of incremental investments going forward, is there anything to flag in terms of changing the mix of incremental margins or incremental free cash flow generation of the business, or are we on a pretty steady path at this point?

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: I would say we’re on a quite steady path. We did one very early hardware investment in these NVIDIA H100 cards just to build up enough internal capacity to run initial stage internal testing and those kinds of things. We chose to just cash pay it. It was $19 million, which is a relatively sizable amount for us. We had plenty of opportunities to finance that in other ways, right? I think as this scales, we optimize for maximum profitability. If we come into a case where we see that, OK, we can keep scaling this up, right? Now we have the business case. We’re also driving the revenue. The product is in the market, et cetera. We will consider that OpEx just like any other and optimize for that. I would expect it to be a more monthly cost type of cash flow nature than one-time major purchases.

Unidentified speaker: Understood. OK. You talked earlier about the gaming opportunity and the gaming browser. When you look about where the gaming landscape could go over the next three to five years, what are some of the more interesting opportunities to drive growth, either on the monetization side or on scaling the user side of the equation when you tie your browser products back into the end market of gaming overall?

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: I think both are exciting opportunities for us. If we do the growth of users first, we have 33 million GX users. It’s a mix of Western and emerging. Average ARPU is $3.50. It’s nearly like twice of all the other products, and it already represents close to or about 20% of our revenue in that product. When we look, that 33 million is still a relatively small part of the total addressable gaming market out there, even in the younger age demographics that we do best in, et cetera. The product scores so well, has great user feedback. It’s the best retention we have, in addition to the highest ARPU. Our journey on that is just keep raising awareness. In terms of geographic focus, we are expanding now also into some key Asian gaming opportunities, like Japan, South Korea, that we think are, I mean, they’re obviously huge potentials.

On the monetization side, you have seen us launch various partnerships. What we are cautious about is that the product has a genuine gaming feel throughout. For example, we’d like to, of course, we’d like to promote new game releases, hardware, games, even content that’s relevant for the segment, but in a way that’s very native in the product and is also useful and interesting for the user base.

Unidentified speaker: Understood. OK. I want to pivot now to sort of growth investments. You’ve talked a lot about deploying money behind different growth initiatives inside the company. Is there a way to sort of rank order what the highest priorities are for incremental growth investments when you look out over the next 6 to 18 months?

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: I think the strategy in terms of the type of users we focus on, the way we reach them, how we work with content and influencers and various marketing channels, all of that, it’s performing very well. I think we’ll continue doing that. On the product side, it’s what we talk about. It’s sort of the next versions of both Opera One and Opera GX, but Opera Neon is the big news this fall. These are not investments like we’re going to, you know, here’s CapEx of the quarter. This is just what does our team spend time on, and how do we allocate our marketing budget? It’s within the normal P&L of the company on a recurring basis, I would say.

Unidentified speaker: Sticking with the marketing budget, for instance, how is the ROI of marketing continuing to evolve? How is the thought process at the company about where you can optimize for return or how you can optimize different channels to generate outcomes on the marketing side continue to evolve as well?

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: I think we see really good effects of promoting the brand, making sure that people are just raising awareness, essentially, that we exist, that we have products that are interesting to various segments. It’s very data-driven because, I mean, a browser business is a business of millions and hundreds of millions of people, billions of clicks at the cent level, right? Love big numbers and all that. When we run a campaign, we immediately see, of course, we see the direct downloads that come as a consequence. We see the uplift in organic traffic. We can follow all the cohorts by product, country, campaign. Within a few days, we sort of see the profile of that user base that come in, their activity level, their retention curve, and the revenue generation.

We have an ROI assessment of every single campaign and a very quick feedback loop to sort of teach us to double down on something, scale back on something, and optimize for, I mean, in theory, as an analytical answer, we should balance our budget so that the ROI is equal on absolutely everything. The marginal dollar generates the same amount. Of course, in practice, it’s not that theoretical, but that’s the guiding principle.

Unidentified speaker: It might be premature to ask this, but when you think about launching something potentially as scaled as a change product like Neon, would that alter maybe the way you think about spending marketing dollars to not only raise the awareness of the company’s brand, but continue to alert customers to a new product? How do you think about striking the right balance there?

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: ROI is ROI. We quickly see how do we, I mean, it comes with, and it won’t all be perfect operations on day one. The potential of where the browser itself is natively giving advice to the user, presenting choice, making recommendations, of course, it comes with a great revenue potential, right, to direct traffic to our advertising partners. We’ve talked a lot about e-commerce opportunities over the past three, four quarters, and how we have scaled that. I think this is just a continuation of that type of opportunity. With ARPU growth, there’s sort of the ability to step on marketing. We managed this. We managed the profitability we think we should have, and then we balance investment and growth with that. I would just say that just in terms of awareness, like the tech media is very aware of Opera. We cultivate those relationships, right?

We make sure that the journalists have early insights and access to our products, that they get to learn about them, that we gather them and give demonstrations, et cetera. If we have done it right, it will be very visible in the tech media when Opera Neon goes live.

Unidentified speaker: Understood. OK. Look forward to those reviews.

Got it. OK. You guys have been very regular returners of capital to shareholders in a couple of different formats. When you take the whole discussion we’ve had today, where you think product is going over the long run, the growth investments you want to make, how do you think about balancing investments back into the business in the name of growth versus the potential that exists to continue to return capital to shareholders?

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: First, as context, because we just added it up, we have returned nearly $500 million now since 2020 to our shareholders. Relative to our market cap, that’s something to be proud of. We run the company like classic stewardship of shareholders’ money, in a sense, half of it in buybacks and half of it in dividends. We have dividend as the preferred method of return now, just because it doesn’t touch our free flows. We like the liquidity in the stock, et cetera. You asked how we think about it going forward, or?

Unidentified speaker: Yeah. What might change that mix? What might change the focus of it?

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: Right. I mean, we run a, it’s 100% essentially organic growth. Our investments are our team that we pay salaries and marketing, which we do on a daily basis. We generate the profits, and we have a good conversion of that to cash. We’re already running at good profitability. We want to keep doing that. We are launching Opera Neon, and we have created that within our daily operations. Every year, we discuss, OK, how would we like to see our, how do we do the trade-off between, you know, do we want to staff up in certain teams, or do we want to spend more active marketing in certain regions, et cetera, versus near-term profitability? I think you’ve seen over the last three years that we’ve essentially managed that to a quite stable, slightly ticking up EBITDA margin, but then 20+% revenue growth.

We’ve landed at that as like a compromise almost, right? We could have spent more money and maybe grown a bit faster and vice versa. That’s where we landed.

Unidentified speaker: OK. One follow-up to that that I do get from some investors is you highlighted that you’ve traditionally preferred dividends, but you have bought back stock. How do you think about the buyback relative to the float dynamic with this? Is that why you’re landing on the dividend? It doesn’t then impact as much the liquidity around the stock?

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: Right. We’ve done buybacks at many times that have maybe seemed that way. Sometimes it’s just been too extreme to ignore that we’ve launched buyback programs. The single biggest one we did was we bought out the pre-IPO shareholder at $5.50 per share before we paid $2.50 in dividends so far, right? Or $2.60, I don’t remember about that since then. The net price of that, I mean, it was already attractive. Of course, that’s one we’re proud of having achieved. We’ve had some rounds in the market. That’s why we lean to the dividend as the recurring underlying method of returning value to shareholders. I guess we’re getting versed in both, and you know, we can take the opportunities.

Unidentified speaker: OK. Last one, just to bring it all together. When you look out over the next three to five years and you guys sit as a management team, what would be the biggest priorities you’re the most focused on executing against? How should we be thinking about you aligning sort of investments to deliver on those strategic priorities on a multi-year view?

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: Three to five years is a long time in our space.

Unidentified speaker: We’ll still be having this conversation if you want to come.

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: When we’re a 35-year-old company in that space, at least in our history, it’s an extremely exciting moment in time, right? I remember back in the day, people asking, will the browser have a future? Will there be an internet browser? Now I’m seeing people are spending more time in the browser, right? You have your email, your calendar. Maybe you’re not in Excel and Word, but you’re in online tools that do the same for collaboration. In addition to new ways of finding information and taking advantage of the full web to do research, et cetera, I think that is an extremely exciting context as we enter that three to five-year period as we look ahead. I guess aspirations for that time are that we can show with Opera Neon, its first and subsequent versions, that actually creating a browser is not so easy.

Having the company knowledge that we do actually puts us in a very good position to make something that people will appreciate. I think that’s the type of product in this period where the browser and these AI tools have so much attention that can make more people just even aware that we exist and that there are alternatives. Taking advantage of this and continuing what we’re doing, we’re quite happy with what we’ve been doing also.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, understood. OK, why don’t we leave it there? Thanks so much for being part of the conference. Please join me in thanking the team from Opera for being part of the conference this year.

Frode Jacobsen, CFO, Opera: Thank you.

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