Page 177 - RusRPTJun24

● Yandex
The Dutch parent company of Yandex, Yandex N.V. (YNV), announced that it has completed the first phase of its planned divestment from Russia.
On February 4, 2024, YNV reached an agreement with a purchaser to sell the group’s Russian businesses for 475 billion rubles ($5.3 billion). On Friday, YNV announced the closing of the transaction’s first phase, involving the sale of approximately 68% of its shares in Russian businesses. The final sale of the remaining shares is expected to happen within the next seven weeks, after which YNV will have no interest in Russian businesses. YNV will, however, retain some of Yandex’s international businesses, including cloud platforms and self-driving car technology. YNV will rebrand these and its other non-Russian assets, in addition to changing the company’s legal name, by July 31.
The buyer is a mutual fund called Consortium.First, made up of several Russian companies, including energy giant Lukoil. Yandex’s new parent company, owned by Consortium.First, is a legal entity called MKPAO Yandex. Shares of MKPAO Yandex will be available to trade on the Moscow Exchange on July 10, and YNV will be delisted on the same day. The Dutch company says that it hopes to resume trading of its shares on Nasdaq, from which it was delisted last year.
This sale is the largest by any Western-owned company leaving Russia since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. It was, however, still subject to the mandatory 50% discount that is applied to all foreign investors from “unfriendly countries” who are attempting to sell their Russian assets. Despite this, YNV Board chairman John Boynton spoke positively about the agreement. “We believe that the proposed sale will position both parts of the current group to develop and grow for the benefit of their stakeholders,” he said. The Kremlin also welcomed the deal; “Yandex is a national technology champion. For us, it is of course important that the company continues to work in the country,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
Former president Dmitry Medvedev, the most prominent hawk among senior Russian officials, criticized Yandex’s efforts to create an artificial neural network. Medvedev was unhappy with the efforts of the company, sometimes dubbed “Russia’s Google”, because its AI chatbot refused to answer questions about Ukraine.
Medvedev, now deputy chair of the Security Council who has built a reputation as one of the most vocal pro-war hawks (read more about that here), has blasted Yandex for its GPT chatbot refusing to answer a series of politically charged questions, including over Ukraine. For instance, it refused to say on which date the United States passed legislation allowing the seizure of
177 RUSSIA Country Report June 2024 www.intellinews.com