Opera Software said it had seen “softer” performance in its mobile advertising business, as it announced another asset sale in what has been a challenging year for the company.
The company sold a majority stake in its Opera TV unit to tech investment company Moore Freres & Co. The purchase price included $80 million in cash and shares equivalent to 30 per cent of Opera TV.
Earlier this year, Opera sold its consumer business to Golden Brick Capital Private Equity for $575 million (the deal closed in November). However, the sale came after an earlier deal, which would have seen Opera sold as a whole to Chinese buyers, fell through following delays in securing regulatory approval.
The company provided a trading update following its latest transaction, in which it said “the mobile advertising business did not exit Q3 2016 with the same tailwind as we saw last year”, and the trend continued into the fourth quarter.
It cited a “lack of big and successful game launches” and “delay of internal product upgrades due to parallel focus on platform consolidation” as contributing factors.
Looking forward, it also predicted “a relatively soft first quarter when compared with Q1 2016”.
Opera remained confident it would turn in a positive performance in the full year 2017, predicting “the significant investments we are making in products, in particular the SDK, a new Core update, artificial intelligence and data science will yield solid revenue growth compared to 2016.”
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