Page 112 - RusRPTDec18

Mikhail Fridman, German Khan, Alexei Kuzmichev, and Petr Aven, acquired the stake in Ekoniva from Rossium consortium of Roman Avdeev and companies affiliated with Avdeev's Credit Bank of Moscow (CBOM), one of the so-called Garden Ring banks that got into trouble last September. CBOM was named as one of the Garden Ring banks that could go bust, but at the end of the day it managed to get through the mini-banking crisis without collapsing. This is a portfolio investment for Alfa, which could be linked to the upcoming IPO. Analysts surveyed by Vedomosti estimated that Russian sanctions risks set aside, Ekoniva could be worth €155mn. The raw milk market is seen as one of the most profitable agricultural segments with 35-40% Ebitda margins.
9.2.7 TMT corporate news
Yandex.Taxi online taxi ordering service of Russian internet major Yandex will launch its operations in Helsinki under the “Yango” (short for Yandex go) brand, Tass reported citing the press service of the company. The cost of the expansion was not disclosed. This is the first step abroad for Yandex.Taxi after having cemented its leading position on the Russian taxi market. After a promising joint venture with Uber, Yandex.Taxi has been consolidating its market share through acquisitions and expanding into the delivery market at home. Earlier this year Yandex.Taxi launched in Serbia, as well as Baltic capitals Tallinn and Riga. Commenting on entering the Finnish market, the company's press service stressed that Russian and foreign apps will be fully compatible. "Russian and other foreign users that arrive for a weekend in Helsinki will not have to install new applications on their smartphones," the press service said, as cited by Tass.
Yandex presented Andromeda, its updated search engine on November 22. The main features of Andromeda include the following.
• The ‘Quick answers’ functionality in the search results has been enhanced.
• The ranking system in the search results has been updated to take the quality of internet resources into account. A marking system for the most popular sites, sites with the highest retention rates and official sites has been introduced.
• Users can save the results of searches (links, films, videos, images and etc.) in Yandex.Collections and can subscribe to other people’s collections.
The company has also introduced compact devices (developed by IRBIS A and DEXP Smartbox) with Yandex personal assistant Alisa installed. The devices look like small loudspeakers and answer to user requests. Bankers do not consider the change in Yandex’s search engine to be a significant stock price driver. Rather, it is a step in the gradual development of the service, which might help to support the company’s market share and revenue growth. Andromeda highlights Yandex’s attempts to increase user engagement, as it adds some tools to enable interaction with other users (for example, via Yandex.Collection). At RUB 3,290, the small speakers with Alisa are a cheaper version of Yandex.Station (which costs RUB 9,990), but with fewer functions (this is similar to Amazon introducing the small version of Echo in 2016).
Yandex.Market, the joint venture of Russian internet major Yandex and country's largest bank Sberbank, launched a beta-version Bringly, a cross-border marketplace, according to Vedomosti daily and RBC business portal. Bringly is the third element of Yandex.Market e-commerce universe, in addition to the platform for searching for goods and comparing prices, and the
112 RUSSIA Country Report December 2018 www.intellinews.com