Mail.ru announced on Monday that its webmail interface is now available in Ukrainian. This marks the first time that Mail.ru has offered its service in a language other than Russian. In addition, the site will be slightly redesigned to include some Ukrainian-style elements, Mail.ru announced.
However, the Russian webmail giant has failed so far to acquire the Mail.ua domain name, which belongs to Internet Invest Group, Ukraine’s largest web hosting service provider.
In January 2012, Mail.ru’s webmail served 4.8 milllion users from Ukraine, or 34.8% of the total number of Internet users in that country, according to Gemius. If taking into account the other services offered on the portal, Mail.ru attracted no less than 8.6 million users from Ukraine, corresponding to a 62% reach.
A former Soviet republic, Ukraine has a large Russian speaking population, but the national language is widely used in the Western areas of the country.
The LSE-listed Mail.ru Group has operated a representative office in Ukraine for more than three years. The office creates or adapts some of the portal’s services to the local market, manages partnerships with Ukrainian web players, and sells inventory to local advertisers.
Mail.ru announced recently that it has become the fourth largest webmail service in the world, far behind Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail, but ahead of AOL, citing statistics from ComScore.
