Yandex has had an eventful year: it rolled out a whole set of new features, invested into quite a few start-ups and enlisted on NASDAQ, raising almost $1.5 billion. Though after the initial hype of the IPO their shares were in decline. According to Q3 financial results released this week, the company is doing very well.

Their revenues jumped 65% from last year to $161.9 million and their net income grew a staggering 93% over the last 12 months reaching $53.5 million. However, their share of the Russian search market slightly dropped from almost 65% to 62.7%. Lost market share went to Google, who is trying to grow their market share in the region with the help of their browser, Chrome (popular especially among young people). Though, as Arkady Volozh, Yandex's founder and CEO retorted to Reuters: 'In the long run, clear market leadership is more important to financial performance than the magnitude of that lead which is likely to fluctuate over time'.

For now Yandex really does not have anything to worry about. Their financials are going strong, they clearly dominate Russian and CIS search engine market and they haven't stopped innovating. Thus, for instance, they recently launched Yandex.Taxi app for iPhone and Android phones that helps easily find nearest taxi in Moscow. Yandex already partnered with 11 taxi providers who altogether have 1000 taxi cars to offer through the service.

On top of that, Yandex staked out their ambitions to enter foreign markets by launching their operations in Turkey this September. As Arkady Volozh commented: 'This is the first time we launched Yandex in a country where people don't speak Russian. We were looking for markets where internet is well-developed, number of users is growing and that has a lot of online content in local language. As a result we chose Turkey. We did not simply localize our existing services but we created a whole new product tailored especially for Turkish users'.

Among its latest accomplishments is Yandex's biggest start-up investment to date - a $15M for a US-based alternative search engine Blekko.  US Venture Partners, CMEA Capital and PivotNorth Capital also participated in the financing round, which altogether amounted to $30M.

The annual financial report is bound to raise Yandex's stock exchange prices and shareholder's confidence in the company's future. It has to be noted that Yandex is doing much better than another giant from Russia that IPOed a year ago - Mail.ru Group. The latter's share prices have been continuously dropping with little reassurence and few innovations coming from the company.