Yandex Moving International Maps Over To NAVTEQ
Russia's largest search engine has announced it has purchased map licenses from NAVTEQ, the Nokia maps subsidiary. The digital maps will be used to develop a detailed world map for the Yandex.Maps service, which currently shows a more "artistic" than realistic cartography of international locations (a current map of Helsinki is shown below). NAVTEQ's service includes highly detailed maps of Europe, North America, Australia and developed countries in Asia, and show intercity motorways, urban traffic networks, streets and buildings. Yandex says it will gradually add new content both to its desktop version and to its mobile application that supports all major platforms.
Yandex Is Now The Default Search Engine For WP7 In Russia
While you would think Microsoft would have leveraged the Windows Phone platform to get add more use of its search engine, Bing, but things are looking otherwise in Russia. The news coming from Russia’s Search Giant, is that Yandex is going to be used as the default search engine on all Windows Phone based devices in Russia. This announcement includes the company’s announcement of partnering with major mobile manufacturing giants like Nokia, HTC and Samsung.
Yandex Goes On Wheels, Introduces Yandex Taxi
In this day and age, what could be worse than making a phone call to arrange a taxi? It sounds too much of a hassle, and while it might be effective for many, the concept sounds too medieval. This is just my personal opinion, but gladly some firms are keen at bringing Cab facilitation online. The idea is to help ease the task for arranging taxis via one single destination. Yandex has started doing exactly that.
The Russian online giant is leveraging its popularity online in Russia to launch a Yandex Taxi Search Service. Yandex.Taxi sends request for booking a cab to all taxi services and accelerates the process of finding a cab for travellers. To start off, Yandex.Taxi has succeeded in partnering with 11 Taxi Service providers. Currently this service is just in beta and the operations are limited to Moscow alone.
Yandex Revenus And Income Up, Market Share Down
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'.
Hyperclap: A Fresh Geolocation App From Russia
Geolocation services are on the rise: more and more start-ups are building applications around check-ins, places, events and social media. Hyperclap, a Moscow-based start-up, decided to join the trend and offer their take on how best to combine all those aspects in one app. Their iPhone app lets you follow locations like bars, restaurants and clubs and instead of checking-in to those places users report from locations through messages and photos. The idea behind Hyperclap is to give a tool for movers and shakers to see what's happening in their favorite locations when they are there or when they are away. The app also generates trending spots to display the most popular places in towns.
Yandex Invests In Zenmoney
Yandex, has invested in one of the applicants and finalists that took part in its Yandex Start event on March 15th - Zenmoney.ru. Zenmoney is a personal finance startup developing an accounting and planning application.
Yandex Announces Pricing Of Its IPO
Today Yandex announced the pricing of its initial public offering of 52,174,088 Class A ordinary shares at $25.00 per share. The shares will begin trading today on the NASDAQ under the symbol “YNDX”. Yandex is selling 15,400,000 shares and certain of its shareholders are selling an aggregate of 36,774,088 shares. Additional 5,217,405 shares were granted as a 30-day option purchase to the underwriters to cover over-allotments, if any, at the initial public offering price. As earlier stated, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank acted as lead underwriters and joint bookrunners on the deal.
More Details On Yandex IPO Revealed
This week details of Yandex's terms of IPO resurfaced everywhere. Though the company refused to comment, it is now clear that Yandex would be enlisted on NASDAQ early this summer and is estimated to raise up to $1.148M by offering around 52.2M shares (or 16% of total issued shares after IPO) at a price of between $20-$22 per share, Quintura reports. Yandex's market value is estimated to be around $7 billion, which is $1 billion more than Mail.ru Group's valuation. However, exact pricing figures would be revealed later this month.
Russian Search Engine Yandex Shared Information With FSB
Yandex has been on top when it comes to coverage recently and sharing another piece won’t be surprising. Unless it isn’t positive. BBC has mentioned that Yandex, Russia’s largest search engine has confirmed sharing confidential data with the state’s secret service; the FSB. Bad news, given that Yandex had set its eyes on raising $1 billion via listing on Nasdaq.
Russia Goes Mapping With Yandex Maps
Yandex has success written all over it when it comes to being the leading search engine and the most visited site in Russia with over 21.5 million average monthly users. When you are this big, there is little reason why you won’t try different things. We have been talking about the Russian Internet company and news has always been different. From providing aspiring entrepreneurs with mentoring at Yandex.Start to funding the same with Yandex.Factory. In its latest release, Yandex announced the launch of Yandex Maps, with map of Moscow and Moscow region being the first to be rolled out earlier.
Yandex.Factory To Finance Startups
Russian firm, Yandex is waking up to assist startups with funding with the initiation of Yandex.Factory. Yandex.Factory is a startup investment program that will provide funding to startup projects in Russia as well as those from the International arena and this investment is by no means small.
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.
Yandex Money Enables Bank Card Integration
Russia’s largest online payment system, Yandex.Money announced the integration of Bank Cards into users’ existing Yandex.Money accounts. This integration would enable users to make payments with their cards and not actually giving away details, which often raises the issue of trust. Of course other than relieving users of the trouble when it comes to typing the card keys.
Yandex Plans $1B IPO
We have been speculating over Yandex's potential IPO ever since Mail.ru filed for theirs last autumn. Those predictions seem to be coming true: Yandex plans $1 billion IPO on NASDAQ June-July this year, reports Vedomosti (tipped by Quintura). The company has already hired Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank to manage the process. No other details were revealed about the news. Yandex controls 65% of all search engine traffic in Runet and this January the company reported a 43% increase in their revenue. That puts Yandex's annual revenue for 2010 at $410M (88% came from contextual advertising).
Yandex Supports Startups
As of this summer, Yandex launched a programme to support Russian start-ups called Yandex Start. The project selects the most promising companies in the region for a one-day seminar to look for possible cooperation and acquisition. Successful applicants receive Yandex's technologies (as APIs), computing facilities and expert advice. Two Yandex.Start sessions were held last year in September and December and as a result Yandex acquired two start-ups WebVisor and Loginza. WebVisor provides visitor behavior analysis (mouse movement, clicks, text copying etc.) that will now be integrated with Yandex's own analytics tool, Yandex.Metrica. The company was founded in 2008 by a small team of entrepreneurs from Moscow.
Yandex's Year-Over-Year Revenue Up 43%
Yandex, one of the biggest internet companies operating in Russia and the likes of Kazakhstan and Ukraine reported its 2010 revenue increase 43% compared to 2009. The giant reported revenues of 12.5 billion rubles in 2010, which equal to $410 million US. Yandex makes most of its revenue from contextual advertising, just as its counterpart Google does in the US.
New IPO From Russia
Russia's biggest search engine Yandex is planning to file for a $1,5 billion IPO early 2011. The company will most likely choose London Stock Exchange for its listings, though New York's Nasdaq was also mentioned as an alternative.Yandex was planning to file for an IPO already in 2008 but world financial crisis got in the way and plans for an IPO were postponed. Sources close to the company shared that Yandex was valued at maximum $3M back then. The company was founded in 1997 and is today 7th biggest search engine in the world by the number of processed queries. More than 61% of the company belongs to investment funds like ru-Net Holdings, Baring Vostok Capital Partners and Tiger Technologies, 24% is owned by the company's managers and other stuff, 10% belongs to private investors and 5% to holders of stock options.
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:
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.
Yandex Revenues Up 80% From 2007
Arkady Volozh, the CEO of the Russian Yandex.ru, has revealed in a conference held last week that their revenues in 2008 are 80% higher than in 2007. Revenues in 2008 were said to be more than $300 million. Yandex has been closely developing itself to become the local Google. This goes hand in hand with the share of revenues. 85% of Yandex' revenues came from contextual advertising both on Yandex' sites as well as partner sites, according to Quintura.
Other figures also confirm that Yandex is truly becoming the dominant advertising solution in Russia. In 2008 it had more than 100 000 advertisers, up 50% from 2007. Quintura also comments that Yandex' search volume is increasing steadily as the Russia heads into economic downturn. Yandex has some 54% marketshare against Google's 32% in the Russian market.
