Opera recently claimed that its flagship, Opera Mini, gets operated by more than thirty million Indonesian monthly active users. A quarter of them are smartphone users, especially Android. This significant number, which increased 2,5 times from last year, has placed Indonesia as the second largest Opera Mini user worldwide right after India.
It is undeniable that although the technology trend has switched to smartphone adoption, Opera Mini remains a favorite due to its excellent compression capability. “There are more and more Indonesian citizens who get connected to Internet via their own devices, and we believe that Opera Mini is the fastest and easiest browser available in the market,” Lars Boilesen, Opera Software’s CEO, stated in his press release.
Opera found out that its users are aged 24 in average, with 4 out of 10 of them go to school or university. Even though the adoption of its Opera Mini in Indonesia is still dominated by feature phone, the growth of smartphone adoption shows promising potential. There is 154% of increase for the adoption of smartphone, with Android as the best performer (156%), followed by iOS (71%). Interestingly, the declining popularity of Blackberry doesn’t stop the platform from gaining 54% of increase for its Opera Mini’s adoption.
Furthermore, almost half (42%) of Opera Mini users via Android use Samsung as their smartphone, while Advan, Sony, Smartfren, and Evercoss are placed respectively behind the Korean giant.
As for feature phone, Nokia still holds the throne. Opera itself has just established a partnership with Microsoft Mobile (formerly Nokia) to make Opera Mini as the default browser for non-Lumia mobile phones.
In regard to the latest Indonesia’s presidential election, Opera noted that content related to law, governance, and politics dominated the browsing activities of Indonesian Opera Mini users. There were 59% of active users attempting to find any information related to the election.
This is in line with what we have informed previously, that news portals got a terrific grace during the period of presidential election. Opera stated that the five most visited websites during the period were Detik, Liputan 6, Kompas, Tribun News, and Merdeka, with Liputan 6 and Merdeka got the largest leap among those five. In average, each and every Android user in Indonesia visited 1225 pages using Opera Mini to access information about the election.
Given this fact, it is just logic that Opera targets entry level smartphone users who spend not so big for monthly internet data package. This is due to the capability of Opera Mini to compress up to 90% of the content, which allows users to open more pages with fewer data consumption.
To reach even more users in Indonesia, Ivollex Hodiny, Opera Asia’s Growth Director, stated that there are three main strategies that Opera holds. Those three are: providing exclusive internet data package together with cellular operators, collaborating with local smartphone vendors to pre-install Opera Mini on their platform, and holding community meetup. Opera has even appointed singer Calvin Jeremy as their brand ambassador, something which has never been done by the company to promote its products in any other country in the world.
