Earlier this morning I tweeted:
Yes, Yandex is sometimes also called “the Google of Russia” and rightfully so. It’s more than just a search engine which owns some 64% of Russia’s search market (versus Google’s 22%) . It also offers an array of other highly-demanded services (dictionaries/machine translation, maps similar to Google’s, blog monitoring, and much more). I’ve used a service of Yandex last week at the Russian Internet Forum in St. Petersburg, demonstrating how comparison shopping engines (CSEs) work. Yandex Market (see a sample screenshot below) is currently the only all-encompassing CSE in the Russia today.
Late Monday (May 23, 2010) Yandex “went public on the Nasdaq market at $25 a share” and, interestingly, “rocketed to close at $38.84, for a 55% first-day gain” [source; emphasis mine], raising “$1.3 billion in a U.S. initial public offering” [source]. Of course, it’s not as impressive as LinkedIn’s 109% first-day gain [source], but still amazing, keeping in mind that it’s a Russian company we’re talking about. Some people yell “bubble”. I say, look at the data. Yandex is really strong Russian company that may be worth investors’ close attention.
I was just discussing this with my cousin over dinner last night (he is visiting from Moscow). It was interesting because I felt that this is a huge opportunity for a Russian company to sort of pave the way to show that Russia could be a safe environment for investment. In addition it is pretty awesome that the company just happens to be an internet magnate.. perhaps potentially bringing Russia a little bit closer to being up to par with the rest of the success of the internet market.
My cousin, being a true Russian was right away very skeptical. (He is a sound designer at MosFilm)… and he said that rather than Russian companies striving to make money and placing Russia on the radar for foreign investment, the majority of Russians (those who are even aware that this is happening) believe that such powers should work harder to develop the domestic environment.. i.e. perhaps building the middle class. On some level, he is definitely right. It was weird for me to see this difference in mindset… almost a direct result of cross-cultural differences.
Yes, there are definitely a number of very different opinions on all of this. I remember reading about the “political risk” over Russia’s IPO market a couple of weeks ago (in one of Wall Street Journal blogs) too. I’m sure we don’t know many details, but I’m like you, Olga — happy to see Russian e-market progress.