Lin Song
Analyst · TD Cowen
Thanks, Matt, and thanks to everyone joining us this morning to review our fourth quarter results. 2024 is already off to a strong start with revenue of $102 million, driven once again by organic growth paired with cost discipline, resulting in $25 million of adjusted EBITDA, representing a margin of 24%. Both revenue and EBITDA exceeded the fourth quarter guidance that we outlined on our last quarterly call. Our user growth strategy remains focused on quality over quantity. We continue to see growth of users in rest of markets, GX users and other high-value users globally, offset by declines in low monetization mobile users in emerging markets. Annualized ARPU was $1.34 in the fourth quarter. It's up of 24% year-over-year. This was primarily driven by the growth of users in high ARPU markets as well as continued growth of Opera GX broadly, which consistently attracts highly monetizable users across markets. In the fourth quarter, search revenue was $43 million, up 14%. This category has consistently grown in the mid-teens and faster than broader search market, enabled by a continued focus on growing the highest value users. During the quarter, Google exercised its option only to extend our current search revenue partnership, a sign of the value of this relationship to both parties. In the fourth quarter, advertising revenue was $59 million, growing 21% year-over-year and representing 58% of total revenue. Advertising revenue continues to benefit from both our owned and operated, meaning our browsers, as well as our Opera Ads business. There is a clear trend that the digital advertising industry has put more focus on high user intent events, be it the shortened journey of a user or the payment activity in association with a travel booking. Being a browser, we are best positioned to capture these interactions, giving results, help choices and suggestions at the right moment. This could be in the form of a product recommendation or a relevant page link with context aided by AI to help put everything into perspective. As a result, advertising revenue within the browser experienced the fastest year-over-year growth since the second quarter of 2021 when advertising revenue was still rebounding post the onset of the COVID pandemic. That's a very direct example of our focus on high-value users translating into financial results. As an independent browser, we are known for our continuous innovation and bringing exciting new features to our browsers. Opera One, which we launched last year, was a great success with the introduction of our browser AI, Aria. In addition, it came with build for UI design, whether it is a Tab Islands innovation or start page animations, benefiting from a robust engine enabling complex graphical operations in the UI AL to be separated out from background processes, ensuring the most elegant browsing experience possible. We see how such features and our strong browser brand drive adoption. When you don't consider a new browser, we are more and more often considered and chosen. We remain encouraged by all the results of the recently implemented Digital Markets Act in the EU. The DMA requires Apple to show a browser choice linked to iOS results in the region and report that for the choice screen in every EU country. Post implementation, we saw a 63% increase in new iOS users in the EU from February to March, still from a small base and with lots of work remaining ahead to fully seize the opportunity. We are very excited about this development and will increase our iOS investments now that the playing field is more level with other key regions potentially also opening up. We are starting from a modest base due to previous platform limitations, leading us to believe that the growth potential is substantial. Again, this reflects a general trend that people show an interest to move away from the boring system default browser to differentiated products that are tailored for particular audience and needs. We believe that this trend will continue and even accelerate. Turning to our gaming browser, Opera GX. We have spoken about it repeatedly, but I think it's a good example of bringing something truly differentiated to market and users loving it. In less than 5 years, Opera GX has reached 29.5 million users, up 6.1% versus the fourth quarter alone. In addition to consistently growing our user base, monetization of the GX user base continues to grow, reaching $3.49 in the first quarter, up 10% compared to a year ago, even as its geography footprint expands in non-listed markets. GX remains our highest monetizing browser both in developed and emerging markets where the regional differences in monetization is less than our other browsers. One of the most welcomed new features is GX Mods, which allows users to customize almost all aspects of the browser. These Mods have a wide spectrum and are very creative. AAA gaming franchises can provide the GX Mods like those we just announced in association with Cyberpunk 2077, a very popular game with the Royal fan base. But also our users actively create Mods. For example, the background music can react in real time to the actions and needs of the users while using the browser based on their key strokes or moves of the mouse. The options are limitless. Users can also upload their Mods to the GX Store and share it with fellow gamers. Since the introduction of Mods a year ago, over 6,000 Mods have been created and shared by our users, and our Mods have been installed over 150 million times. That is a great testimony of how this functionality is appreciated by the gamer audience and the potential related to differentiation in the browser space, which in reality is still largely untapped. I'm going to end on the continuation -- the evolution of our embrace of AI. We continue to roll out new generic AI additions within the Opera browser. In the fourth quarter, we announced our AI features drop project, which gives users of our Opera One developer build access to our latest AI explorations. We drop new features as often and every few weeks, making us one of the fastest movers in the space. One highlight is the experimental support of one of 50 different local large language model variance from approximately 50 families of models which are not natively supported to be downloaded and can run locally on a user's own computers within the browser. And in terms of speed, last week we added support for the latest Llama 3 model just 1 day after its release. This step marks the first time local large language models can be easily accessed and managed from a major browser to a building feature. The local AI models are a complementary addition to Opera's own Aria AI service, which epitomize our new fully green energy powered AI cloud store in Iceland that we announced in February and is now fully operational. It is indeed an interesting time for a browser with a massive user base and a brand for innovation. We are fascinated about all the changes happening around us and cannot wait to explore the path ahead. So now let me turn the call over to Frode to discuss the financials and guidance for the second quarter and 2024 in more detail. So Frode.