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The owner of Yandex, often referred to as “Russia’s Google”, has said it will pull out of its country of origin.<\/p>\n
Its Dutch-based parent company sold the operation in Russia for 475 billion roubles<\/a> ($5.2bn; \u00a34.2bn), much lower than its estimated market value.<\/p>\n The sale to a consortium of investors means Yandex’s Russian business is now a fully Russian-owned entity.<\/p>\n The firm has previously been accused of hiding information about the war in Ukraine from the Russian public.<\/p>\n Moscow has welcomed the latest deal which the company said was “the product of an extensive period of planning and negotiation over more than 18 months”.<\/p>\n “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,” said Anton Gorelkin, deputy head of the Russian parliament’s committee on information policy.<\/p>\n “Yandex is more than a company, it is an asset of the entire Russian society,” he added.<\/p>\n Set up in the dotcom boom in the late 1990s, Yandex developed its own search engine, mapping and advertising businesses. Other services include taxis and food delivery.<\/p>\n The $5.2bn deal is believed to be significantly lower than Yandex’s market value, which was estimated to be almost $30bn in 2021.<\/p>\n Despite its nickname of ‘Russia’s Google’, Yandex has no ties to the US search engine giant or its parent company Alphabet.<\/p>\n Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many foreign-owned businesses have exited the country, often selling assets on unfavourable terms.<\/p>\n Russian president Vladimir Putin also ordered the seizure of others<\/a>, such as assets belonging to Western brands Danone and Carlsberg.<\/p>\n Yandex’s co-founder, Arkady Volozh, is one of very few top Russia-linked businessmen to have publicly spoken out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine<\/a>. He left the firm in 2022.<\/p>\n Mr Volozh has been hit with sanctions by the European Union, which in 2022 said 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”.<\/p>\n He is seeking a European Union court to remove sanctions as he says he was never close to the Russian president Vladimir Putin.<\/p>\n To comply with the Russian government’s demands over its content, Yandex sold some of its online resources to state-controlled rival VK in late 2022.<\/p>\n Even though Yandex presents itself as independent of the authorities, experiments by BBC Monitoring in 2022<\/a> showed that its search results failed to report Russian atrocities in Ukrainian city of Bucha.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n