The Moscow Times reports that Yandex, the largest search engine in Russia, plans to raise $1.5b to $2b in a New York IPO this fall. Their source has said that these expectations are based on a preliminary valuation of Yandex at $5 billion.
Meanwhile Google is looking to improve their performance in Russia, Google co-founder Sergei Brin said in an interview in Moscow last week.
“Yandex received about twice as many searches in Russia per day than Google”, Brin said, “We think our search is better, but [Yandex] also has many talented people”.
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Nick Wilsdon
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They are talking about IPO for maaaaany years. One can be sure that IPO will happen sometimes by many reasons including rewarding investors and employees. It is also important to have enough money to fight Google.
In many interviews, Volozh said that Yandex revenues are SOOO HUUUGE that it does not need money. However, I don’t believe him. Yandex certainly needs a lot of dough to keep up with increasing costs of running a business in Russia. This includes but not limited to rising salaries in Russia (as much as 2,000-4,000 for a good specialist) and rent costs. In addition, they’ve started indexing “Big” Internet and definitely need a lot of resources to increase the number of indexed pages to a reasonable level of about 10 billion.