Yandex IPO: forget about 2009, still on track for this year
Written on 4th September 2008
3 COMMENTS 
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The day before yesterday, rumors spread around the web about this year’s biggest tech IPO. Russian search engine Yandex wouldn’t want to go to NASDAQ this year, due to the unstable political situation in Russia. During a press conference, Russia’s most important investor sort of canceled the deal. As it turns out, it was a nice piece of wishful thinking. The Yandex IPO plan is still on track.
The Russian Internet insider news site Roem.ru reported that Finam just announced its market expectation. It wasn’t official information from Yandex. I guess things got messed up because of language barriers, and Profy got the wrong information. The high numbers mentioned in the post, an IPO of around 3 to 5 billion dollars aren’t correct either. We’re still talking about a $2 billion IPO on NASDAQ in fall 2008.
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By Svetlana Gladkova on Sep 4, 2008
Actually I don’t remember mentioning an official announcement from Yandex in that post – I stated it was told by an investment fund at a press conference. It was wrong for me (and multiple other Russian bloggers and journalists) to assume that the fund actually had any information from Yandex so we were obviously mislead. That’s a pity, true, but I really think it will be crazy for Yandex to go public this year – so maybe it’s because I was expecting this type of news I easily believed it.
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I don’t get it either, but I think I agree with you. The news made sense, that’s why we all thought it was official. Just another learning moment. As long as everybody admits that nothing goes wrong ;-)
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Well, it was obviously no official announcement but it sounded like a reliable source close to the event. But actually what I read on the Roem.ru website did not sound reliable either – so we’ll have to wait for an official announcement from Yandex until we are able to tell where exactly the truth is.
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