Opera and Mxit team up in Africa

Johannesburg – November 7, 2011

Mxit, the leading mobile social platform in Africa, today announced a partnership agreement with Opera Software. Opera and Mxit will work together to bring the best mobile experience to consumers in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria.

Opera users in these African countries will now have one-click access to Mxit services, and Mxit users will be introduced to the Opera Mini Browser.

Mini browser through the chat client. Opera Mini will appear under the Apps menu. Mxit will appear on the Opera Mini start page. Both are accessible via virtually any data-capable handset.

Mxit is an African social network that allows users to chat to one another on their mobile phones or PCs anywhere in the world. Mxit does not charge for the sending and receiving of multimedia messages to and from mobile phones and PCs, as it uses the Internet.

Mxit has a global registered user base of over 45 million, with the majority of these users residing in Africa. It records about 45,000 to 50,000 new registered user accounts per day and processes over 750 million messages every day.

According to Mxit’s CEO Alan Knott Craig, “Mxit empowers African people by helping them build community and make money via their mobile phones. We believe the alliance with Opera will bring us a step closer to fulfilling that vision.”

The Opera Mini browser delivers the Web faster and at a lower price than any other mobile browser. It does this by compressing the pages before they are sent onto consumers, leaving all the functionality but reducing the size of each page by up to 90%. A good example of this is how, using Opera Mini, people can access a news site, like www.24.com, nine times more frequently than other browsers, using the same amount of data.

Opera Mini shares many features with Opera’s browser for the desktop, including tabbed browsing, password manager, bookmarks and Speed Dial.

“Mxit and Opera Mini are hugely popular in South Africa, and this partnership will provide consumers with easy access to South Africa’s favourite web services,” said Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera Software.

About Mxit

Mxit is the biggest social network in Africa, allowing tens of millions of people to community fast and affordably.