Fast-Growing Yandex Postpones IPO

Files under: Enterprise, News, Search Cases, Tech
Posted by: Quintura @ 17:02 [11. 10. 08]

The leading Russian search engine has reached 50 million searches per day, the company announced on its corporate . This number includes searches made on Yandex partner sites , , , and others that use Yandex.XML to power search results.

This will imply that Yandex run rate of monthly searches has increased to 1.5 billion, up from 1 billion in January 2008. That would rank Yandex the 6th largest worldwide search property after Google, Yahoo!, Baidu, Microsoft, and Naver and ahead of eBay, Time Warner, and Ask.

The company also recently that a daily audience of Yandex Advertising Network of sites that embed the Yandex.Direct contextual ads now reaches more than 10 million users, up 80% from September 2007. The Yandex advertising network was launched just two years ago. Its partners include , and , as well as several web search services of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian Internet , , , , , , , and . In 2007, the Yandex advertising network accounted for more than 10% of Yandex revenues of $167 million.

According to business daily that quotes investment bankers, the shareholders of Yandex have decided to postpone its multi-million dollar IPO on Nasdaq because of the world’s financial crisis. The IPO was originally planned for the second half of 2008. The private equity investors Internet Search Investments and Baring Vostok Capital Partners own 35% stake in Yandex. Tiger Technologies owns the other 15% stake in the company.

In July 2008, the shareholders of web portal Mail.ru also postponed the company’s IPO in London until next year.

Tags: yandex, Yandex advertising network, Yandex Direct, Yandex IPO