Opera was broken into separate parts a while back, and now the part of the company that actually works on consumer products like the eponymous Opera browser is filing for a $115 million initial public offering in the United States. The move is being filed under the company name Opera Limited, and will come with a hefty $14,317.50 registration fee payable to the United States Securities And Exchange Commission. This massive amount will be aggregated with shares only valued at $.0001 as of filing. That value will likely be revised as the market dictates leading up to the actual IPO. The filing is effective immediately, and already has pre-purchases of $50 million, 9.5 million, and $450,000 laid out by partner IDG Capital Fund, which means that around $49 million is still available for the general public to purchase. The shares are being filed as a combination of ordinary shares and American Depository Shares, which means that there is no special requirement to buy them. The shares will be traded under the NASDAQ ticker OPRA.
Opera has active user numbers well into the hundreds of millions for its desktop and mobile browser products, and between all of its products, it managed to generate around $128.9 million in total operating revenue for 2017, $6.1 million of which was considered profit. Opera has seen a positive growth pattern across its lineup recently, which puts it in a fine position to put out an IPO. The $115 million that it’s looking to fundraise, it’s worth mentioning, is the maximum it’s looking to pull in from its IPO, about $61 million of which is already spoken for. This means that Opera may fall short of that goal, or could hit that goal and still take in more from venture capital investments that don’t manifest as share purchases.
Opera has long been the underdog among the major browsers, being Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and then of course Opera. The company has made steady strides in the advertising tech and news industries, leading to its ad-tech arm going public long ago. The fact that the company is looking to raise funds for its browser project with an IPO may well be a sign that the company is planning big things in the near future.