The owner of Yandex, often referred to as “Russia’s Google”, has said it will pull out of its country of origin. Its Dutch-based parent company sold the operation in Russia for 475 billion roubles ($5.2bn; £4.2bn), much lower than its estimated market value.
The sale to a consortium of investors means Yandex’s Russian business is now a fully Russian-owned entity.
The firm has previously been accused of hiding information about the war in Ukraine from the Russian public.
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”.
“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.
“Yandex is more than a company, it is an asset of the entire Russian society,” he added.
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.
Credit: bbc.com
