Mobile traffic on Opera Software’s mobile browsers in Russia increased by 141.6% from September 2010 to September 2011, while the number of users in the country grew by 44%. These figures were disclosed yesterday in an exchange between Russian business daily RBC Daily and Lars Boilsen, CEO of the Norwegian company.
The Opera browser, a free software, is used by 17 million Russians monthly, representing a 67% market share, according to web analytics company StatCounter. While mobile broadband is still underdeveloped in the country, users enjoy the browser’s compression capacity which lowers their mobile data traffic.
Opera hopes its application store, driven by strong growth on the Russian and Indian markets, will affirm itself against such giants as Apple, Android, Nokia and Blackberry. Boilsen ambitiously expects Opera will become the third most popular application store by number of downloads in the world as early as next year, RBC reported him as saying.
