- By Mariko Oi
- Business reporter
Image supply, Getty Images
The proprietor of Yandex, also known as “Russia’s Google”, has stated it’s going to pull out of its country of origin.
The sale to a consortium of traders means Yandex’s Russian enterprise is now a totally Russian-owned entity.
The agency has beforehand been accused of hiding details about the struggle in Ukraine from the Russian public.
Moscow has welcomed the newest deal which the corporate stated was “the product of an extensive period of planning and negotiation over more than 18 months”.
“This is exactly what we wanted to achieve a few years ago when Yandex was under threat of being taken over by Western IT giants,” stated Anton Gorelkin, deputy head of the Russian parliament’s committee on info coverage.
“Yandex is more than a company, it is an asset of the entire Russian society,” he added.
Set up within the dotcom growth within the late 1990s, Yandex developed its personal search engine, mapping and promoting companies. Other companies embrace taxis and meals supply.
The $5.2bn deal is believed to be considerably decrease than Yandex’s market worth, which was estimated to be nearly $30bn in 2021.
Despite its nickname of ‘Russia’s Google’, Yandex has no ties to the US search engine large or its father or mother firm Alphabet.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many foreign-owned companies have exited the country, typically promoting belongings on unfavourable phrases.
Mr Volozh has been hit with sanctions by the European Union, which in 2022 stated Yandex is “responsible for promoting [Russian] state media and narratives in its search results, and deranking and removing content critical of the Kremlin, such as content related to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine”.
He is looking for a European Union courtroom to take away sanctions as he says he was by no means near the Russian president Vladimir Putin.
To adjust to the Russian authorities’s calls for over its content material, Yandex bought some of its on-line assets to state-controlled rival VK in late 2022.
Even although Yandex presents itself as unbiased of the authorities, experiments by BBC Monitoring in 2022 confirmed that its search outcomes did not report Russian atrocities in Ukrainian metropolis of Bucha.
