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- Written by Mariko Oi
- business reporter
image source, Getty Images
The owner of Yandex, also known as the “Google of Russia,” has announced that it will withdraw from the country.
The sale to a consortium of investors means that Yandex’s Russian operations will become a fully Russian-owned entity.
The company has previously been accused of hiding information about the Ukraine war from the Russian public.
Moscow welcomed the agreement, which the company said was “the culmination of more than 18 months of extensive planning and negotiations.”
“This is exactly what we wanted to achieve several years ago, when Yandex was under threat of acquisition by Western IT giants,” said Anton Gorelkin, deputy head of the Information Policy Committee of the Russian parliament. ” he said.
“Yandex is not just a company, it is an asset of the entire Russian society,” he added.
Founded during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, Yandex developed its own search engine, mapping, and advertising business. Other services include taxis and food delivery.
The $5.2 billion deal is believed to be significantly lower than Yandex’s market value, which is estimated to be around $30 billion as of 2021.
Despite its nickname “Russia’s Google,” Yandex has no ties to the US search engine giant or its parent company Alphabet.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many foreign companies have withdrawn from Ukraine and sold their assets, often on unfavorable terms.
Mr. Volosh was sanctioned by the European Union, which said in 2022 that Yandex was “liable for propaganda.” [Russian] Derank and remove content critical of the Kremlin, including reporting in state media and its search results, as well as content related to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. ”
He insists he was never close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and is asking a European Union court to lift sanctions.
To meet Russian government demands for content, Yandex sold some of its online resources to state-run rival VK in late 2022.
Yandex claims to be independent from authorities, but a 2022 BBC monitoring experiment found that its search results did not report Russian atrocities in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.
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