In a bulky 140-page report, the Russian Ministry of Communications and Mass Media highlights an 8.4% total year-to-year growth of the ICT sector, particularly 14% in the IT field. According to the report, the overall volume of the ICT sector in Russia totaled 1.9 trillion rubles ($68.6 billion) in 2010. Of the total ICT market, …
Russian ICT market totaled $68.6 billion in 2010 (government report) Read More
MegaFon, a leading Russian mobile operator, has made its phone interpreting service available nationwide. The service, which until now was accessible only from Moscow region, uses a three-way conference call format, enabling a person to speak with another person through an interpreter.
Since 2002, Yandex has established itself as the leader of the online search market in Russia. Not only did it leave its Russian competitors in the dust – nowadays Mail.ru commands less than 8% of the search market and Rambler less than 2% – it has also successfully resisted Google’s offensive. Technologically, the initial Yandex …
Yandex vs. Google: Why the US giant failed to conquer Russia Read More
Today, only one player can pretend to match, or hope to surpass, Yandex on the Russian Internet market: Mail.ru Group, a behemoth that was introduced last year on the London Stock Exchange. Both groups are comparable in their range of revenues (Yandex: $439.7 million in 2010; Mail.ru Group: $324 million) and in their good financial …
Yandex vs. Mail.ru Group, the two behemoths of the Russian Internet Read More
If considered literally, the long list of “risk factors” published in Yandex’s IPO prospectus could terrify any reasonable investor. The list starts with countless business risks. Yandex does not hide its strong vulnerability to variations of the advertising market: “We generate almost all of our revenues from advertising, which is cyclical in nature.” Not only is …
The Skolkovo project, in partnership with Cisco, handed out 5.25 million rubles ($175,000) to three winners of their jointly sponsored Skolkovo Innovation Prize competition. Moscow inventor Evgeny Smetanin, 50, walked away with first prize of 3 million rubles ($100,000) for his project on transforming children’s toys into modular robotic playing devices.
Bloomberg reported yesterday from “a person with direct knowledge of the matter” that Yuri Milner, the Russian businessman who created DST, completed the financing for DST’s new fund, DST Global II, having raised about $1 billion. Alisher Usmanov, who backed DST Global I, said last month he is “just a financial investor” in DST Global …
Soyuz-Telecom, a WiMAX operator little known until now, announced last month the extension of its coverage to Vsevolozhsk, a city in the St. Petersburg region. The company, founded in 2007, now covers 17 small cities across the country. It has not, however, disclosed its number of subscribers. Russian entrepreneur Theophan Bondarenko owns a majority stake …
Yandex looks to raise up to $1.1 billion offering 52 million shares between $24 to $25 a share, up from an initially considered price of $20 to $22, commanding a market value around $7 billion. Yandex will list on the NASDAQ under the symbol YNDX starting from May 23, 2011. In light of this IPO, East-West …
Although Yandex is best known internationally for its search engine, its other services — some of which are very far from search — are used everyday by millions of Russian-speaking Internet users. This is why the company deserves to be named an integrated Internet group rather than a search service. East-West Digital News is happy …
Yandex assets: A dominating player far beyond the search market Read More
Had not Sergey Brin emigrated with his family to the United States at the age of 6, his destiny might have perhaps resembled those of Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich, the Russian mathematicians who founded Yandex. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Volozh and Segalovich were rather typical representatives of …
From startup to IPO: How Yandex became Russia’s search giant Read More
1990 Two information search systems — the International Classifier of Inventions and the Goods and Services Classifier — were developed in DOS by Arcadia, the company founded by Arkady Volozh and Arkady Borkovsky. These systems provided the foundation for Yandex’s technology.
