We have noticed your article, “Investigative Report Special: Africans beware of Opera, OPay and others in their genre,” and we are extremely concerned to see several serious inaccuracies, speculations, and opinions presented as fact.
We are particularly troubled by the fact that we were given no right of response – your author claims to have reached out to us for comment, when in fact we never received any questions. We would have been happy to clarify and respond, but we were never contacted by them, for this or for any other article.
To address some specific inaccuracies and false facts presented by the article:
● Opera is, in fact, a Norwegian company, headquartered in Norway and publicly listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange (OPRA), with the majority of our executive team being based in Oslo. As a listed company, we have different shareholders from around the world, one of which is Kunlun Tech Co, which is not a consortium but a publicly listed company on the Shenzhen stock exchange.
● As a Norwegian company, Opera is subject to Norwegian and European laws. As such, we are GDPR-compliant and we handle user data as dictated by European laws and regulations. In fact, being a European company and governed by EU law is an advantage for all users, as the EU and the broader European Economic Area have one of the most robust privacy protection frameworks in the world. We apply the GDPR to our internal processing across the Opera Group of companies, even when it might not apply directly to our affiliated companies outside of Europe. This means that we export GDPR protections even to our non-EU users, which includes our Africa-based users. At Opera, we take the trust given to us by our users very seriously and we do not, under any circumstances, share user data outside of what GDPR allows.
● The article makes reference to non-existent persons, such as the so-called “Opera’s Chief Human Resources Officer, David Qi”, whom no one in our company is familiar with.
● OPay was incubated by Opera many years ago, but Opera has only been a minority shareholder in OPAy for quite some time. Today, we are two different companies and have no operational connection.
● The article continues to argue that Opera is not contributing locally to Africa. This is false and misleading. Opera provides unique products that millions of Africans benefit from every day, saving up to 90% of their data costs and providing internet access on any device, ranging from feature phones to smartphones. As an example, in the past three years, Nigerian users have saved millions of GB of data through Opera Mini data compression technology.
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● We believe we are a leader in providing onboarding to the internet throughout Africa. While this is not labeled as a CSR program, it is unique and has been transformational to how the internet is used throughout the continent.
As an example, when we entered the Nigerian market, the internet penetration rate was 6%. Now the rate is around 40%, marking an incredible growth in internet access across the country, which Opera majorly facilitated with its initiatives and innovations. One of the ways Opera has invested in the market is Free Data Campaigns. Since 2020, Opera has been running Free Data campaigns in partnership with Nigerian telcos. MTN and Airtel users are receiving 1.5GB of free data per month just by using Opera Mini. During the past four years, Opera has given away dozens of millions of GB of free data to Nigerian users.
In addition to this, we do provide local or regional CSR programs when applicable. There is a reference in the article to WorldReader and we are proud of how we have collaborated with them for more than 14 years, helping millions of Africans get access to free e-books and educational content. This is an impactful program, where we as a company provide free access to advertising inventory and our unique compression engine to the NGO. It’s truly sad to see someone attempt to smear such campaigns and initiatives.
Finally, in addition to all the factual mistakes and clearly misleading intentions in the article, we would like to point out that it is claimed to be written by an author that does not seem to have an online presence or any other previous record in journalism. Even though the author is supposed to be running an investigative journalism project, the article is full of factual errors, misrepresentations, and smearing statements that do not stand up to scrutiny. As such, we urge you to unpublish the article.
Best,
Richard Monday
Vice President of Africa at Opera
