Russian search engine Yandex goes to Times Square, where $2 billion waits

Written on May 21, 2008 – 10:59 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

About a month ago we reported that the Russian search engines were on their way to enter the regions of world’s largest search engines, comfortably next to Google. The CEO of visual search engine Quintura Yakov Sadchikov keeps us up to date by emailing the latest on Europe’s third search market. Well, today is one special day for the Russian search engines: leading party Yandex is preparing for an IPO on Nasdaq this autumn and plans to raise $1.5 billion to $2 billion.

Yandex office: Dmitry Ivanov, head of development; John Boynton,
board member; Arkady Volozh, CEO

A few days ago, Yakov told us that studies from comScore learned Yandex was ranked third in Europe ahead of both Yahoo and Microsoft with 528 million or 2.2 percent of European searches in March 2008. In the same report, comScore said Eastern European search properties “will likely to gain traction and grow market shares”. So today, a news report about Yandex’ IPO from Reuters confirmed comScore’s prediction.

The expectations of raising up to $2 billion are based on a previous valuation of Yandex, which pinpointed the value of the engine on a staggering $5 billion. Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch reported that - when taking the ranking of Yandex in account - its revenues are not that large: “in 2007 it reported only $167 million in revenues, which was a 130 percent increase from 2006″. It’s probably the promising character of the Russian tech market that drives the high valuations.

Yandex’ march to Times Square is not the only IPO news from Russia today. The largest Russian free web mail provider and portal Mail.ru heads to London for an IPO that would value the company at $2 billion, reported business daily Kommersant today.

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ipo, mail.ru, nasdaq, russia, search, yandex

About the author: Ernst-Jan is blogger and co-organizer of BLOG08, who previously worked in New York to cover news at the United Nations. Next to writing, he's also a singer in the band Christina Five. Follow him on Twitter or read his personal blog Dutchproblogger.com .

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2 comments/trackbacks to “Russian search engine Yandex goes to Times Square, where $2 billion waits”

Sep 2, 2008: Yandex delays Nasdaq IPO till “next year”
[...] the upcoming $1.5 billion to $2 billion IPO of Yandex, certainly the biggest tech IPO we would have seen in a while, the Russian search giant got a fair [...]

By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on May 21, 2008

Those are some pretty impressive number! I wonder if US investors won’t be hesitant to invest in a market they don’t know anything about. Going to follow this one with great interest.

[Reply]

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