Sber and Mail.ru Group are not on the brink of divorce, said Sber’s chairman Herman Gref in a media interview last week, dismissing repeated rumors and reports.
Gref conceded that “complex problems” do occur with Mail.Ru, since their respective ecosystems partly intersect, but “we have very good relations and do find solutions.”
There is less competition between the two groups than there was between Sber and Yandex — which was the “absolutely objective” reason why they broke their long-standing alliance last year, Gref explained.
Last month The Financial Times learned that Sber and Mail.Ru are considering splitting jointly-owned assets, including meal delivery service Delivery Club and ride-hailing service Citimobil. These companies are part of a joint venture called O2O, agreed in 2019, into which the two partners injected some $160 million in August 2020. FT cited O2O as valued at $1.6 billion.
