Russian search engine Yandex may go public on NASDAQ in June or July 2011, trading shares amounting to $1 billion, reported Bloomberg and Russian business daily Vedomosti. According to unnamed sources, the IPO would be managed by Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley.
Yandex initially planned its IPO in 2008, but the offering was postponed.
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%. With 27.9 million users over 12 years of age last month, according to TNS, it is the most visited Russian-language website. It 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.
In 2010, Yandex launched an English-language version, earning praise for the accuracy of its results, according to US business magazine Fast Company. The magazine has just ranked Yandex among its 2010 list of the world’s 50 most innovative companies.
In 2008, Yandex opened a laboratory in Palo Alto, CA, “with the objective of fostering innovation in search and advertising technology.” Among the lab’s 14 employees are “senior research scientists and engineers with a wealth of research and development experience from top US search engine companies, such as Yahoo! and Google,” says the company.
In its preliminary unaudited 2010 financial results, the company reported consolidated revenues of 12.5 billion rubles ($410 million), an increase of 43% in one year. Revenues of contextual advertising, which represented 88% of the total, were generated by more than 180,000 advertisers.
Should the company go public, it may be valued under the same criteria as Google, whose revenues also come primarily from contextual advertising. When Google went public in 2004, it had an estimated capitalization of $23.1 billion. By analogy, Yandex’s total capitalization could reach from $4 to 8 billion, following the calculations of Alexey Kurasov of Finam, a leading Russian financial company, reports Vedomosti.
For the moment, Yandex has declined to comment on the IPO issue.
