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bne December 2022 Cover story I 39
when it first appeared. It has, like Yandex, gone on to be a pioneer in telecoms services to the Russian public and is a household name.
In addition to Torbakhov, the buyers will be Beeline executive vice presidents Svetlana Kirsanova (for retail business), Maxim Zaikov (for corporate business development) and Valery Shorzhin (for network technological development),
as well as Renat, vice president for corporate development, mergers and acquisitions Nasretdinov, specified in the statement.
“In accordance with the terms of the agreement on the transaction, Veon will receive RUB130bn from the sale of the asset. The transaction is expected to be completed no later than June 1, 2023, with the parties entitled to extend this period if the necessary licenses and regulatory approvals are not obtained,” the release notes.
The transaction is planned to be formal- ized for the company Copernicus-Invest 3 JSC, Veon said in a statement. This legal entity was registered on Novem- ber 14, its sole owner and CEO, as of November 24, is Torbakhov, according to SPARK-Interfax.
Separately, the provisions of the transaction spell out possible scenarios according to which the asset may come under the control of third parties over the next 30 months from the date of closing the transaction, follows from Veon's statement. In particular, if the shareholders of the Russian business decide to resell it at a higher price during this period, Veon will be entitled to part of the proceeds from this transaction, the Dutch company said
in a release. If control in the acquiring company passes to third parties, the agreement “provides the right to termi- nate the transaction in favour of Veon,” the Dutch holding said in a statement.
Kremlin encroaching on RuNet
One of the businesses that Yandex NV will keep is the self-driving car enter- prise into which it has invested heavily and is currently amongst the world leaders in this technology.
Driverless vehicles developed by Yandex hit 1mn miles of test drive mileage in Russia, the US, and Israel, the company announced in October 2019.
"This important milestone firmly establishes Yandex as Europe’s largest driverless car developer, ranking the company in the top five autonomous vehicle companies globally, which have completed this distance," Yandex said at the time, adding that the group conducting the tests also includes Waymo, Cruise Automation, Baidu and Uber.
That put Yandex amongst the top five experimental self-driving car startups at the time. The mileage of Google's driverless subsidiary Waymo in 2019 was 12.9mn km, while all of its testing fleet has a mileage of 29mn km. The subsidiary of General Motors Cruise Automation had 0.9mn km mileage in 2018 and 2017, while Uber Technologies claimed to have reached 2mn km in 2017.
Most of the mileage for Yandex was done on actual public roads in live traf- fic, most of it in Moscow and Tel Aviv since 2018. All of the tested vehicles bear the names from the science fiction series Westworld. In 2020 Yandex doubled its fleet of driverless cars to
Yandex.zen, in August this year to arch rival VK for an undisclosed sum.
The deal will allow Yandex to exit the Russian news aggregation sector, which was presenting the company with problems at home and abroad, as it was accused of filtering its news offering to promote the state’s propaganda associ- ated with the war in Ukraine. In its defence, Yandex said that there was a ban on promoting international or opposi- tion media so all only news available to the service was state-backed news and hence had a built-in pro-government bias. The company hoped by getting
out of the news aggregation business entirely it could solve this problem.
A press release on Yandex’s website said: “As sole consideration for these assets, Yandex LLC will acquire 100% of the food delivery service Delivery Club,” the statement added, naming
a highly successful and apolitical food delivery e-commerce business that belonged to VK.
The News and Zen platforms had been something of a thorn in Yandex’s side for the last year. The former is an aggregator of news materials which receives over 10mn daily visitors. The latter is a TikTok style personal recommendations plat-
“Driverless vehicles developed by Yandex hit 1mn miles of test drive mileage in Russia, the US, and Israel”
200. Before the war, operational self- driving taxis in Moscow were seen by analysts as possible by 2024.
Yandex NV is also a major player in the international cloud computing business.
One the other side of the coin Yandex Russia has sold some its businesses, the news aggregator Yandex:News in particular.
Yandex closed a deal to sell the news service, as well as media company
form that uses machine learning tech- nology to present a user with suggested posts. Yandex.zen had over 22mn active users a day in 2021. Delivery Club couri- ers will join the Yandex Pro technology platform, but Yandex hopes to maintain the Delivery Club brand rather than merging it with its own ultrafast delivery service Yandex Eats.
VK caught the headlines after it was taken over by Vladimir Kiriyenko,
the son of the former prime minister Sergei Kiriyenko and the head of Putin’s
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