Opera sold to Yandex?

Rumors told that Opera will be sold to Facebook. Such a deal does not seem to make much sense any more. But there are quite some signs indicating preparations to sell Opera (and the announcement of the acquisition seems to be close):

• Jon von Tetzchner left the company
• Jon von Tetzchner sold nearly half of his shares
• strategical technological changes like extensions (replacing unite and widgets) and Webkit (replacing Presto)
• more than usual of the Opera veterans left the company in the last months
• since some weeks there are nearly no open positions to fill

I thought about who might want to buy Opera, checking the big companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Symantec and Oracle. But for none of them a purchase of Opera Software ASA currently matches – neither technologically nor regarding the strategic markets.

With Yandex it looks like I finally found a pretty perfect fit. The fast growing Russian search giant matches at least in following points:

• Yandex wants to expand, internationally (heading towards Western Europe) and in markets (e.g. releasing an own Yandex browser). Thus Yandex should be interested in Opera markets and in Opera technology to push this expansion forward quite a bit
• Opera and Yandex are already partners (search, Yandex browser uses Opera Turbo technology)
• Opera has a big browser market share in Russia (well above 30%). Thus Opera is even interesting for the Yandex home market
• Yandex has enough money

And as I sometimes like to make predictions I'll give a very specific forecast (and thus quite probable to fail at least in some points):
Announced in early Q2/2013 Yandex buys the share majority of Opera ASA Software for approx. 950 (+/- 150) million USD.
😉