Yuri Milner Sells Almost $60 Million In Mail.Ru Stock
This news is already a bit outdated by internet standards, but important nevertheless. Yuri Milner, the billionaire chairman of Mail.Ru has sold $59.5 million worth of Mail.Ru stock through his DST Global company. The sale happened towards the end of September, Forbes reports.
The move is significant for a few reasons. Firstly, the company went public in November 2010 so selling so much of his personal stake in the company so soon isn't a very good signal to the market. Furthermore, the stock has been heading downhill more or less since the IPO and this sale further pushed the stock down that day.
Who's Who: Runet's Top Players, Part 2
In the previous post we introduced the latter half of the top ten Runet's movers and shakers. Now is the time to talk about the top five. But first a few words about the rest of the high-flyers on the Forbes top 30. The types of companies top executes belonged to varied: from social networks, game-developers and e-commerce sites to recruitment website HeadHunter (owns up to 50% of marketshare and earned $1.7 in first half of last year) and antivirus software Kaspersky Labs (4th largest in the world with income of over $500M last year alone). Founders of internationally known services like Evernote (Stepan Pachikov) and Chatroulette (Andrey Ternovsky) were placed 13th and 15th respectively. Evernote attracted $20M from Sequoia Capital in 2010 and Chatroulette was one of the most talked-about services that year.
Who's Who: Runet's Top Players, Part 1
Forbes.ru has recently published a list of 30 most notable web players in Russia. Judging by the results, the most influential people in Runet have been in the business for decades. There are some young talents there too, though very few. Internet market is clearly dominated by local businesses: the only person working in a foreign company, placed 25th, was Vladimir Dolgov, the head of Google Russia. One-quarter of all the people on the list belonged to Mail.ru Group, clearly the most prominent player of all. Investors ranked much higher than founders of recent services and unsurprisingly the list included only two women. In the first part of presenting the list, we looked at the latter half of the top 10 movers and shakers of Runet.
Spotify In Talks With DST About Funding?
TechCrunch has heard from their sources that apparently DST, the Russian originated investment company, is in talks with Spotify to close a large funding round. While all this is still unconfirmed, the round could be valued at $100 million. In total, the company has raised financing of over $80 million to this day. Having followed DST somewhat closely here at ArcticStartup, this would strike more of a natural continuum for DST instead of something out of the blue.
DST Uncovered: Russian Super VC Invests Into Groupon
Amid recent news of Groupon closing a $950M funding round, it might be easy to miss that Digital Sky Technologies was one of the main investors. The Russian super VC is on a serious shopping spree. Apart from the Groupon deal it recently invested $50M in Facebook and is said to be eyeing a stake in Twitter, who is likely to be the next web darling to close an investment round soon. Add that to DST's stakes in Zynga, Vkontakte, Nasza-klasa.pl (leading Polish social network), HeadHunter.ru (Russia's largest jobs website) and a complete ownership of ICQ, Mail.ru and Odnoklassniki and you'd see a meer part of DST's might.
Breakdown Of Mail.ru Group's Finances
When filing for an IPO Mail.ru Group disclosed some interesting financial indicators for the different platforms they own. At the moment Mail.ru Group itself is mostly owned by Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian investment fund. Mail.ru Group's fixed assests include 10% of Mail.ru portal, 100% of a social network Odnoklassniki, 91% of recruitment portal Headhunter.ru, 100% of ICQ LLC, 24,99% of Russia's biggest social network Vkontakte.ru, 25,09% of QIWI Investments, 2,38% of Facebook, 1,47% of online-game developer Zynga Inc. and 5,13% of Groupon. On top of that Mail.ru owns minority shares in a plethora of Russian and Ukrainian Internet companies.
DST Looking To Invest Into Twitter?
Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian holding company that owns shares in various web properties, is looking at Twitter with a possible investment in mind, according to SFGate. Digital Sky Technologies, or DST, previously spun off Mail.ru from it's holdings into a company of its own and sold 17% of the company at a valuation well above 5 billion USD.
Runet: 5 Top Russian Websites
Russian internet market is scarcely covered outside of the country but it's not for the lack of news. The main obstacle is language: most online services are oriented towards domestic market and are hence mostly in Russian. Another thing is innovation: there are few companies (if any) that have come out of Russia with truly ground-breaking ideas - most of the services are copies of similar American websites. Nevertheless, the number of internet users is growing together with the size of their pockets. Hence, a number of companies managed to build impressive userbases, make big bucks and dodge the competition from abroad.
According to the latest numbers released by TNS Russia and comScore, the top websites are:
Reuters: Mail.ru IPO Oversubscribed
Mail.ru, former Digital Sky Technologies from Russia, is filing for an IPO in the London Stock Exchange. The company has received quite a bit of publicity in the recent years as it has invested into some high flying internet properties including Facebook and Zynga. Reuters reports that sources close to the deal say the IPO has been oversubscribed with more than two weeks left before pricing.
Yandex Launches Yandex Answers
Seems like innovation is diminishing at least on some level, since now the Russian search giant Yandex has launched their own Q&A service. Yandex Answers is similar to many of its rivals in the western world, like Yahoo Answers. Yandex Answers is not alone however - Google has its own service as does Mail.ru.
Yandex Answers has an added value to the service however. It has readily indexed more than 4.5 million questions and 14.4 million answers from various blogs and forums. This should give it a head start compared to its rivals. On top of these, the regular Yandex member can answer the questions as an expert on the topic. Currently the only visible business model on the site is advertising.
