Opera Limited (NASDAQ:OPRA) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Frode Jacobsen: No, in the other operating items, so from like hosting, legal, travel, office costs, et cetera. So, the stuff that I commented on the cost of revenue items combined the marketing costs and the cash compensation cost, and then I just commented on the total for everything else prior to adjusted EBITDA and the P&L.

Mark Argento: All right. That makes sense. And then, in terms of the focus incremental spend going forward, I’m assuming you’re going to continue to target Western markets. It looks like where you’re getting a lot of growth and a lot of extensions. Is that consistent in ’23?

Frode Jacobsen: I think dollar-wise that — I mean that strategy remains. It’s proven very successful for us, and we still see a lot of room to grow. As Song also talked about, there are definitely very attractive pockets and good growth to be had also in emerging markets. And so, we have been — we are investing in that, too. But we have gotten better at focusing on monetizable users there. So that they are, of course, massive markets and we will focus globally.

Mark Argento: Great. Thanks, guys, and congrats again.

Frode Jacobsen: Thank you.

Operator: We will take our next question from Alicia Yap with Citigroup. Please go ahead.

Alicia Yap: Hi, thank you. So, good morning, management. Thanks for taking my questions. Also, congrats on the strong results and the guidance. I have two questions. First is, wanted to follow up on this, your partnership with OpenAI on AIGC. I think you touched a little bit in the earlier question. I’m just wondering, the benefit that you’re going to see, one part of it is the higher user time spent, right? And then, what kind of content that you believe that would be improved on the targeting efforts that you can reach out to the user? And so far — or has that’s already launched? And then, so far, is that more obvious that you’ll see that improve in user engagement on the mobile version or on your PC browser? So that’s the first question.

Song Lin: Yes, sure. This is Song Lin. So, I’ll try to answer it. So, actually, it’s like this, right. So, I think it’s — so first of all, just a comment that there’s in general two kinds of AI, right? So, one is the discriminative AI, which is actually what Opera has been using, and it’s also the one being used in news recommendation, content recommendation, and other pilots, for instance. And the other is the generative AI, which is what’s been popular now. So, I would say that moving forward, we’ll probably see both becoming more and more relevant, and the (ph) a bit more focus, right? So, the first one, discriminative AI, will be able to give you more relevant contents. I think that we already — actually it’s always ongoing.

People just perhaps didn’t notice it, but then it’s becoming much more visible, right? And then, like, I think the generative AI are more like in the ground where people will be able to see content with their own flavor, right, more like one — you need to do that. You can have a particular flavor of ways how do you want to see the news or articles, you cannot, of course, always ask AI to give you a summary based on your flavor, right? So, I think I would say that’s more like one algorithm is to be able to give you the relevant content, the other is turn the content into what you might like. So, I think both are going to be very relevant. Like as I said, it’s still very early stage. But as that’s proven to be very clicking with also users’ mentality, right.