Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on October 12, 2008 – 12:50 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
After Russian investment group Finam spread rumors of a delayed Yandex IPO last September, it now appears to be definite. According to business daily Kommersant, several investment bankers have said that the Yandex shareholders decided to postpone the $2 billion IPO - which was planned for fall 2008.
After Finam told the press its market expectation was that the IPO would be delayed due to the unstable political situation in Russia, Yandex didn’t confirm this. So the general opinion remained that the IPO was still on track. Yet after the recent credit crunch, it isn’t too surprising that the shareholders aren’t fond of an IPO.
The private equity investors Internet Search Investments and Baring Vostok Capital Partners own 35% stake in Yandex. Tiger Technologies owns the other 15% stake in the company.
Hat tip, as always when it comes to Russian news, Yakov Sadchikov from Quintura (read about his secret here).
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Written on September 4, 2008 – 9:23 am
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.
Written on August 4, 2008 – 12:16 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
There’s a new loner in the wild west of Russian search engine land, where millions of dollars are spent and Google is just small potatoes. Alisher Usmanov is his name. This man is the founder of Metalloinvest (mining company, €3.3 billion a year) and owner of publishing house Kommersant. As a true media visionary, he has decided to invest in the Russian Internet industry. And when a business man like him enters a market, you know he’s gonna do it with a bang.
What about an acquisition of a 10%-20% stake in Russia leading and Europe’s no. 3 search engine Yandex ($167 million in 2007)? Usmanov wants to buy them from the founding fathers of Yandex as well as via the shares at the upcoming IPO on NASDAQ. To give you an idea about the importance of these negotiations, the IPO was valued up to $5 billion. That means the stake could be worth a staggering $1 billion.
The Quintura blog offers some more background info on Alisher Usmanov’s Internet adventure. Usmanov might be encouraged by the Russian government to get a grip on this booming Internet industry, like he was when he bought the newspaper Kommersant.
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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