Russia’s leading search engine Yandex announced that it has filed a registration statement with the SEC for a proposed IPO on NASDAQ, TechCrunch reports. According to the filing, the proposed maximum aggregate offering price amounts to $1 billion. A portion of the shares will be issued by Yandex, and a portion will be sold by certain of its shareholders.
Yandex could be valued between $6 billion and $9 billion, The Wall Street Journal and Russian business daily Vedomosti reported earlier this month from different unnamed sources.
The potential valuation would place Yandex ahead of Mail.ru Group, the other leading Russian Internet player that began trading on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) last October. The Mail.ru Group offering was oversubscribed by a factor of 20, and its IPO provided the group and its owners with $912 million in liquidity and advanced its valuation to $5.71 billion based on the initial price.
Russian companies cannot be certain, however, of introducing themselves as successfully on Western capital markets. For example, in spite of its excellent financial results, Euroset had to postpone its IPO last week on the LSE because it failed to attract investors. Citing one reason for the IPO’s lack of appeal, a banker told Dow Jones Newswires that “it [the market] looks a bit overcrowded now with a few Russian companies preparing their IPOs in London.”
Yandex is the leading Russian-language search engine, well ahead of Google in Russia. Its market share is estimated to be between 55% and 64%, and it is the most visited Russian-language website, with 27.6 million users over the age of 12 as of February, according to TNS. It also dominates the fast-growing Russian contextual advertising market, which was worth approximately $470 million in 2010.
Yandex also has noticeable market shares in other Russian-language countries, including Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
