Page 121 - RusRPTMay19

$250mn IPO in May-June 2019 on NASDAQ, Vedomosti daily reported on April 11 citing unnamed investment bankers and sources close to the shareholders of the company. HeadHunter originally planned to hold an IPO in December 2017, but had to postpone the offering due to sanctions' effect on the market. The offering could be organised by Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, VTB Capital, Sberbank CIB, and BofA Merrill Lynch. While not a single IPO or SPO was seen in 2018, since the start of this year a number of companies have announced deals including Polyus Gold which raised $390mn from a placement and rail operator RusTransCom that announced IPO plans, among others. However, the SPO by meat major Cherkizovo has failed, as reported by bne IntelliNews this week. HeadHunter is the leader in the online recruitment segment in Russia with over 50% market share as well as in several neighbouring Russian-speaking countries. In 2018 the classifieds market grew by 28% to RUB10.3bn, according to J'Son & Partners estimates cited by Vedomosti daily. The start-up was founded in 2000 under the name ‘National Job Club’. Starting from 2007, Yuri Milner’s Digital Sky Technologies (which later became Mail.Ru Group) bought stakes in HeadHunter, but Mail.Ru Group sold the company in 2016. HeadHunter’s new owners are “investors close to Alisher Usmanov,” a key shareholder of Digital Sky Technologies and Mail.Ru Group, notes industry observer Yury Amnosov. Most recently Russia's largest bank Sberbank acquired 100% in Russia's third largest online recruitment service Rabota.ru for an undisclosed amount, which could pose competitive threats to HeadHunter.
Russian online retailer Wildberries posted 85% year-on-year growth in revenues in the first quarter of 2019 to RUB38.9bn ($603mn), with the number of unique users up by 89%. Wildberries is Russia's largest online store for three consecutive years, is one the highest-valued Russian Internet companies at $1.2bn, and earned its founder and owner Tatyana Bakalchuk the status of Russia’s second ever female billionaire. The highest growing segments in the first quarter were electronics, office equipment, as well as household and kitchen appliances. Wildberries also noted a significant growth in online orders of footwear, among other apparel. The company linked the growth in revenues to both the expansion of the product line and the development of the pick-up point chain. In the reporting quarter Wildberries opened 800 new pick-up points, bringing the total number to 3,700 (operated in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Kirgizia).
Telegram, the messenger service of self-exiled Russian digital entrepreneur Pavel Durov, has shared a beta-version of its block-chain platform TON with a limited number of professional blockchain coders around the world, Vedomosti daily reported on April 11 citing unnamed companies that were granted access. Last year Telegram raised a record- $1.7bn in two rounds of private ICOs for TON, which includes digital identification system and own cryptocurrency Gram. The first peak on the platform shows "extremely high speed of transaction," but some of the specs, such as smart contracts, are only being tested. TON pledged to have higher transaction speed than Bitcoin and Ethereum, competing with Visa and MasterCard. The platform uses cryptocurrency Gram and integration with the 260mn Telegram messenger users would make it the most widespread blockchain currency in the world. The credibility of previous reports that the first stage of the project TON Virtual Machine (TVM) was 95% ready and tested in September 2018 was questioned by industry analysts surveyed by Vedomosti. The report sent by Telegram to investors in 2018 looked as if the company has the ambition of running its own decentralised alternative to the Internet, which could face many unforeseen complications when launched.
121 RUSSIA Country Report May 2019 www.intellinews.com