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Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

ir.yandex

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Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#41

Post by thriftwy »

vlovich123 wrote: post #35
rat9988 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has nothing to do with google and alphabet. Apart from being a good search engine and a competitor within the same space.

OP is describing it as an analogy of what the equivalent action by Alphabet would be and it’s pretty accurate - Yandex search remains in Moscow while the rest of Yandex operations (eg cloud) remains in the EU.

95% of what Yandex N.V. owns is ООО Яндекс business in Russia. I don't even believe they are keeping Yandex assets in Belarus and Kazakhstan. So that becomes a box that is mostly empty.

I don't believe anybody is going to pay for actual Yandex Cloud in Europe where they have AWS and Hetzner.

So even Russia-based Yandex Cloud with actual racks and users remains in Moscow. What they may keep is vague "cloud technologies" and Clickhouse. Still, these are not a large business. Think VMWare and MongoDB combined. Please correct me if you know more.

Their self-driving stuff, was also mostly used in Moscow. Genuinely hope they would find customers, such as Hyundai.

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#42

Post by diego_sandoval »

pavlov wrote: post #21
trompetenaccoun wrote: post #13

>(Russian Google) Are there people here who don't know Yandex? Genuinely curious, if you didn't know what it is I'd like to hear from you.

The Yandex brand is only directly used in the Russian market, I think? The company does also have popular products abroad like the discount taxi app Yango, but you need to connect the dots there. (I suppose they intentionally try to brand these products away from Yandex to reduce the impact of the Russian connection.) Regional sites and apps in general aren’t that well known. How many people on HN are familiar with K…

I use Yandex on a weekly basis because its reverse image search is much better Google and Bing.

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#43

Post by brnt »

ssijak wrote: post #6
H8crilA wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird accounting tricks in Russia include "the new nobility" making you offers that you cannot refuse. This is a country in which the FSB (equivalent of the FBI) is running their own protection rackets, even on a small scale of a local shop. Property law works very differently over there, which is to say it doesn't quite exist.

You can refuse, but then your chance of dying by "falling off the balcony" goes up dramatically.

In my circles, the joke is having heart attacks while shooting oneself in the back after falling out of windows.

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#44

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

yreg wrote: post #33
fragmede wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This community's favorite thing is to complain about something that's ill defined. A post about BGP without saying it's the border gateway protocol will have its comments go off on a stupid tangent of if an HN reader should be expected to know what BGP is. (seriously people, go Google the term and don't demand everyone spoon-feed your intellectual midgetry!) Thus, an explanation that Yandex is Russian Google is to tr…

I don't think it's a good explanation. If I had no idea what Yandex is, the title would make me think it is a Google subsidiary to evade sanctions or something.

“#1 search engine in Russia”. Done and done.

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#45

Post by mkl »

r721 wrote: post #5
shp0ngle wrote: post #3

Huh? What are their other businesses then? Is this some weird accounting trick?

Yeah, it's some complex deal, which is hard to make sense of. Here's a Bloomberg story: >Yandex Parent Cuts Ties to Russia in $5.2 Billion Unit Sale https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-05/yandex-pa... And here's FT: >Search engine Yandex to sell Russian operations for $5bn https://www.ft.com/content/1f965442-e3f9-46dc-ae4d-ef2e05740...

The FT one (https://archive.ph/YiA3q) says almost nothing. The Bloomberg one (https://archive.ph/AsVYu) says "The Russian unit represented more than 95% of the Yandex Group’s consolidated revenues in the first nine months of 2023, and approximately 95% of its consolidated assets and employees." Not much left!

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#46

Post by nsonha »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #13

>(Russian Google) Are there people here who don't know Yandex? Genuinely curious, if you didn't know what it is I'd like to hear from you.

Their software counterpart seems nice. I have only had experienced with Yandex browser though, at the time I liked to try out different browser to find what work best.

Yandex was minimal looking on both mobile and desktop and had nice features such as its equivalent of Opera Turbo, automatically use of a separate container for banking apps etc. They also have a Russian dubbing feature for Youtube but I don't know how well it work or any risk of censoring, not speaking the language.

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#47

Post by throwaway_20357 »

Throw73747 wrote: post #28
threeseed wrote: post #11

This is likely related to the US imposing secondary sanctions early this year. Yandex would lose access to their US/EU bank accounts if they were still operating in Russia.

Not just that. Russia is going to confiscate all Western assets in Russia as a counter measure. Valued roughly at 200B USD, mainly owned by EU countries. Yandex would lose their Russian business in any case.

I think there is little hope of normalizing relations with Russia, so unfortunately these "Western assets" need to be written off anyway. A large part of them ($98bn) came from Cyprus which might just be round-tripping Russian money.

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#49

Post by trompetenaccoun »

wkat4242 wrote: post #19
trompetenaccoun wrote: post #13

>(Russian Google) Are there people here who don't know Yandex? Genuinely curious, if you didn't know what it is I'd like to hear from you.

I know it but only because they didn't require phone confirmation for email accounts so it was great for sockpuppets. I've asked around here to my colleagues and none of them have ever heard of it. One of them asked if it's the same as baidu :)

Thanks, that's what I wanted to know. Not blaming the user for explaining, I just didn't understand why an explanation is needed on this site of all places. Like others have pointed out, Yandex isn't only used by Russians but around the world. They clearly have the best freely accessible reverse image search since Google has impaired theirs for whatever reason. But I guess I'm in a bit of a bubble assuming that everyone knows the company.

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#50

Post by angra_mainyu »

charcircuit wrote: post #40
beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're over-estimating how many people actually "surf" the net. I'd wager most of HN knows Yandex, but you're average, non-tech industry, person in NA has essentially no need or situation when they would run into Yandex (aside from streaming, even then they probably aren't explicitly going to the yandex url). You would see the same case for a Chinese search engine. People in general spend a remarkable amount of time…

>but you're average, non-tech industry, person in NA has essentially no need or situation when they would run into Yandex They have the most popular reverse image search tool now that Google got rid of theirs

Yep, and surprisingly good too (I use it daily).
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