Mobile Browser Vendor Opera Sees Exploding Mobile Growth, Makes Gains in Africa

Africa represents an enormous opportunity for mobile device manufacturers – and remains a major target for the likes of Nokia for both feature phones and smartphones, as well as a “sky’s the limit” opportunity for browser-based Internet access. Africa has almost no legacy wire line infrastructure, which has translated (as it has for other emerging countries) into opportunities for building out extensive wireless communications capabilities.

Wireless operators continue to bring communications access to huge swaths of African territories, and users for those services rely, in great part, on lower cost feature phones to access the mobile Web and a wide range of Internet services that were previously and almost entirely unavailable to tens of millions of people across the entire continent. To say that Africa is in the midst of a mobile web browsing transformation is, in fact, an understatement. How much of an understatement?

 One needs only to look at a just released report from Opera – which provides the market’s leading third party mobile Web browser in the form it’s Full Opera Mobile and its Opera Mini products. The Opera State of the Mobile Web Report, which the company delivers every month, examines Africa it its latest incarnation.

The report provides a handy clickable map offering a concise guide (based on more than 1000 data points) to top sites, handsets, mobile penetration and other metrics for 53 total countries. Opera’s own analysis provides a number of key findings:

• 25 out of 53 countries - 47 percent – now have international news sites as the most popular news source. Countries include Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Egypt, Libya and Côte d’Ivoire. 18 of those 25 countries turn to the BBC as their most-used source.
• 36 countries more than doubled their Opera Mini user bases in one year.
• The mobile web has made a comeback in Libya. In the year since the revolution, Libya has grown the most in every category of Opera Mini usage; including users, page views and data consumption.
• Côte d’Ivoire also showed spectacular growth. The number of Opera Mini users rose 600 percent in one year. Page views grew 744 percent, meaning people are browsing more pages than they did the year before. Data use grew 760 percent, outpacing the growth in page views.
• Across Africa, data growth seems to outpace page-view growth. This fact suggests that Africans are browsing larger pages and most likely, using richer, more advanced websites.

Global Growth

In June 2012, more than 200 million people used the Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browsers. Out of this number, more than 17 million were Opera Mobile users, and the rest were Opera Mini users. Compared to June 2011, Opera Mini and Opera Mobile combined grew more than 47 percent year over year.

• Opera Mini users viewed over 115 billion pages in June 2012. Since June 2011, page views have increased more than 55 percent.
• In June 2012, Opera Mini served 2,015 million MB of data. Data in the Opera Mini browser is compressed by up to 90 percent. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 20 petabytes of data in June. Since June 2011, data traffic has risen more than 88 percent.

For many of these 200 million users, a browser is more than a tool to access and browse the Web. In most cases for those in emerging countries it is literally the only means for doing so. Providing a service that reliably and cheaply delivers critical information to just about everyone with a feature phone (as well as a small percentage of smart devices) is the reason for Opera’s ongoing success.

Will Smartphones Trump Opera?

One of the open questions surrounding feature phones is how quickly these mobile devices will go extinct and be replaced by cheap smartphones. A key reason Microsoft struck its Windows Phone deal with Nokia is to find a path to making low cost Windows Phone 7/8 smartphones available to exactly the emerging wireless markets that Africa represents. With Apple you get Safari, with Android you primarily get Google’s browser, and with Microsoft you get IE. As smartphones push feature phones out, will Opera continue to have a market? Will enough users opt for Opera when native browsers that, for the most part, work well and efficiently, are already in place?

Interestingly, Opera has a hugely loyal group of users – those 200 million people Opera touts are, for the most part, die-hard Opera fans. Regardless, if Microsoft has its way (granted, it is still a big if that depends on Nokia’s ability to sell smartphones into its core feature phone markets), Opera may ultimately be squeezed out. We do note as well that the latest version of Opera Mini for the iPhone has stumbled a bit in terms of how well it works – at least if user ratings count for anything.

We look forward to seeing how Opera evolves its business as the feature phones it has long relied on begin to disappear.

Want to learn more about today’s powerful mobile Internet ecosystem? Then be sure to attend the Mobility Tech Conference & Expo, collocated with ITEXPO West 2012 taking place Oct. 2-5 2012, in Austin, TX. Co-sponsored by TMC Partner Crossfire Media the Mobility Tech Conference & Expo provides unmatched networking opportunities and a robust conference program representing the mobile ecosystem. The conference not only brings together the best and brightest in the wireless industry, it actually spans the communications and technology industry. For more information on registering for the Mobility Tech Conference & Expo click here.

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