The owner of Yandex, often dubbed “Russia’s Google,” has announced its withdrawal from Russia, with its Dutch-based parent company selling its Russian operation for 475 billion roubles ($5.2bn; £4.2bn), considerably below its estimated market value.
The sale, finalized to a consortium of investors, renders Yandex’s Russian business now fully Russian-owned.
Previously accused of concealing information about the Ukraine war from the Russian public, Yandex has received Moscow’s approval for the transaction, which the company described as the result of over 18 months of planning and negotiation.
Anton Gorelkin, deputy head of the Russian parliament’s committee on information policy, hailed the deal, stating, “Yandex is more than a company, it is an asset of the entire Russian society.”
Established during the dotcom boom in the late 1990s, Yandex has developed various services, including a search engine, mapping, advertising, taxis, and food delivery.
Despite its moniker as “Russia’s Google,” Yandex has no affiliation with the US tech giant or its parent company, Alphabet.
The $5.2bn transaction is notably lower than Yandex’s market value, which stood at approximately $30bn in 2021.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, numerous foreign-owned businesses have departed the country, often selling assets under unfavorable terms.
President Vladimir Putin also ordered the seizure of assets belonging to Western brands like Danone and Carlsberg.
Yandex’s co-founder, Arkady Volozh, departed the company in 2022 and is among the few prominent Russian-linked businessmen to publicly oppose Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
He has faced sanctions from the EU, which cited Yandex’s promotion of Russian state media and narratives, and deranking of content critical of the Kremlin.
Volozh, seeking to overturn the sanctions, asserts he has no close ties to Putin. In compliance with Russian government directives regarding content, Yandex sold some online resources to state-controlled rival VK in late 2022.
Despite positioning itself as independent, experiments by BBC Monitoring in 2022 indicated that Yandex’s search results omitted reports of Russian atrocities in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.
Source-BBC
