Company Overview and Market Presence
– Yandex is a Russian multinational technology company that provides Internet-related products and services.
– Yandex Search is its Internet search engine, launched in 1997.
– The company offers information services, e-commerce, transportation, maps and navigation, mobile applications, and online advertising.
– Yandex primarily serves audiences in Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Turkey, and countries with significant Russian-speaking populations.
– It is the largest technology company in Russia as of 2017.
– Yandex has more than 30 offices worldwide as of 2018.
– Its main competitors in the Russian market are Google, Microsoft, VK, and Rambler.
– Yandex Search has the largest market share of any search engine from Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States.
History and Acquisitions
– Yandex was invented by Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich in 1993.
– The name ‘Yandex’ initially stood for Yet Another iNDEXer.
– Yandex.ru search engine was launched in September 1997.
– Yandex introduced contextual advertisement on its search engine in 1998.
– In 2000, Yandex was incorporated in Cyprus as a standalone company.
– Yandex acquired Russian social networking service moikrug.ru in March 2007.
– In June 2008, Yandex acquired SMILink, a Russian road traffic monitoring agency.
– The company acquired the rights to the Punto Switcher software program in September 2008.
– Yandex invested in Face.com in September 2010.
– In November 2011, it acquired software developer SPB Software.
Finances and Offices
– Yandex became profitable in November 2002.
– In 2004, Yandex sales increased to $17 million, up 1000% in 2 years.
– The net income of the company in 2004 was $7 million.
– In May 2011, Yandex raised $1.3 billion in an initial public offering on NASDAQ.
– The weekly revenue of Yandex.Direct context ads system exceeded $1 million in June 2006.
– Yandex Labs, a technology and business development unit, opened in Silicon Valley in 2008.
– Istanbul office and web portal in Turkey launched in 2011.
– First European office in Lucerne opened in 2012 to serve EU advertising clients.
– Research and development office in Berlin started operating in 2014.
– Shanghai office launched in 2015 for work with Chinese companies in the Russian language market.
Products and Services
– Yandex.Direct online advertising network launched in 2001.
– Yandex became the default search provider for Russian-language builds of Mozilla Firefox 3.5 in 2009.
– Free legal music player introduced in search results in 2009.
– Yandex Music, a music streaming service, launched in 2010.
– English-only web search engine launched in 2010.
– Yandex Search provides search results and features such as image search and maps.
– It offers a range of search services including web, image, video, news, and shopping search.
– Yandex.Games is an internet gaming platform available on browsers and mobile devices.
– The platform includes over 10,000 games in its catalog.
– Yandex.Games generates income through advertising and in-app purchases.
Technologies and Controversies
– Yandex conducted tests of autonomous cars in Moscow in 2018.
– The company released its first smartphone, the Yandex.Phone, in 2018.
– Yandex implemented the YandexGPT generative neural network in the virtual assistant Alice in 2023.
– Automatic voice-over translation for YouTube videos in multiple languages was introduced between 2021 and 2023.
– Yandex launched a test of its first self-driving taxi in Moscow in 2023.
– Yandex was accused of illegally collecting Ukrainian users’ data and sending it to Russian security agencies.
– Yandex services were banned in Ukraine in May 2017.
– Yandex was targeted in a cyberattack using the Regin malware in October and November 2018.
– Yandex’s security breaches include unauthorized access to email inboxes and data harvesting from applications.
– Yandex was fined by the Moscow court in June 2023 for its refusal to share user information with the Federal Security Service.
Yandex LLC (Russian: Яндекс, tr. Yandeks, IPA: [ˈjandəks]) is a Russian multinational technology company providing Internet-related products and services, including an Internet search engine called Yandex Search, launched in 1997, information services, e-commerce, transportation, maps and navigation, mobile applications, and online advertising. Yandex Holding Company was incorporated in 2000. As of 2016, it primarily served audiences in Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Turkey, and countries with significant Russian-speaking population.
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 Headquarters in Moscow | |
Native name | Яндекс |
|---|---|
| Nasdaq: YNDX, MCX: YNDX | |
| Industry | |
| Founded |
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| Founder |
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| Headquarters | Moscow, Russia |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people |
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| Products | List of Yandex products and services |
| Revenue | $4.84 billion (2021) |
| $189 million (2022) | |
| -$199 million (2021) | |
| Total assets | $8.82 billion (31 December 2022) |
| Total equity | $4.53 billion (31 December 2022) |
Number of employees | 10,227 (2020) |
| Parent | Yandex N.V., Schiphol Boulevard 165, Schiphol Airport, Netherlands |
| Website | |
| Footnotes / references | |
As of 2017, the firm was the largest technology company in Russia. It had more than 30 offices worldwide in 2018. Its main competitors in the Russian market are Google, Microsoft, VK, and Rambler.
Yandex Search has the largest market share of any search engine from Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States and is the 3rd largest search engine worldwide after Google and Bing.
Yandex LLC's holding company, Yandex N.V., is a naamloze vennootschap (Dutch public limited company) with its head office listed at an address of a virtual office in Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport. Yandex N.V. is listed on Nasdaq and has a secondary listing on the Moscow Exchange, although trading in Yandex shares on Nasdaq was suspended in February 2022.
