Yesterday Yandex, the NASDAQ-listed Russian search giant, announced its financial results for the Q4 and FY 2017.
The last quarter of the year saw the company’s revenues reach 27.9 billion rubles ($483.7 million), up 26% from Q4 2016, while its adjusted net income jumped to 5.2 billion rubles ($91.1 million), up 62% year-on-year. (The inflation rate in Russia in 2017 reached just 2.5%, according to government statistics).
If considering the full year, Yandex’s revenues amounted to 94.1 billion rubles ($1.63 billion), up 24% year-on-year. Its adjusted net income reached 15.4 billion rubles ($266.6 million), up 9% compared with 2016, with a margin of 16.3%. The adjusted EBITDA amounted to 29.1 billion rubles ($504.8 million), up 11%, with a margin of 30.9%.
Consolidated revenue breakdown
Segment revenues
The Search and Portal segment includes all Yandex services offered in Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan (and, for periods prior to the imposition of sanctions on Yandex by the government of Ukraine in May 2017, all services offered in Ukraine), other than those described further. The Taxi segment includes the Yandex.Taxi service and Food delivery business FoodFox acquired in December 2017. The Classifieds segment includes Auto.ru, Yandex.Realty, Yandex.Jobs and Yandex.Travel. The Experiments segment refers to media services (including KinoPoisk, Yandex.Music, Yandex.Afisha and Yandex.TV program), Yandex Data Factory, Discovery services (including Yandex Zen and Yandex Launcher international revenues) as well as Search and Portal in Turkey. “Eliminations” represent the elimination of transactions between the reportable segments, primarily related to advertising.
Increased market share
Yandex claims that its share of Russian search market, including mobile, averaged 56.5% in Q4 2017, compared with 54.9% in Q3 2017, and reached 56.7% in December 2017. Its search share on Android in Russia was 45.0% in Q4 2017, compared with 41.2% in Q3 2017 and 37.0% in Q4 2016.
These evolutions might be the result of changes in Google’s practices following the settlement, in April 2017, of a two-year legal procedure over what the Russian authorities judged to be violations of the antimonopoly legislation.
Among the other news of the year were:
- A 10% increase of paid clicks on Yandex’s and its partners’ websites, in aggregate, compared with Q4 2016;
- A 9% increase of cost per click, compared with Q4 2016;
- A 250% increase of the number of Yandex.Taxi rides; compared with Q4 2016;
- The launch of Alice, the first conversational intelligent assistant designed for the Russian market, which however remains to be improved;
- The acquisition of food delivery service Foodfox;
- An agreement with Uber to merge the two companies’ respective taxi-hailing and food delivery businesses in Russia and some neighboring countries;
- An agreement with Sberbank to form a joint venture based on the Yandex.Market platform;
See more details in Yandex’s press release.
