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Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses
- apapapa 3y agoWhere are they from now? Not that it matters much.
- piannucci 3y agoWiki says they're incorporated in Netherlands.
- ChatGTP 3y agoI personally think it does matter, I use it often to find things that I can't find on Google. I was actually just thinking today how many thing I've been able to find using Yandex that I couldn't find using Google and that in some ways, I almost prefer it as a search engine lately.
- shp0ngle 3y agoHuh? What are their other businesses then? Is this some weird accounting trick?
- H8crilA 3y agoWeird accounting tricks in Russia include "the new nobility" making you offers that you cannot refuse. This is a country in which the FSB (equivalent of the FBI) is running their own protection rackets, even on a small scale of a local shop. Property law works very differently over there, which is to say it doesn't quite exist.
- ssijak 3y agoYou can refuse, but then your chance of dying by "falling off the balcony" goes up dramatically.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- H8crilA 3y agoAh yes, just like in Russia we all know someone who was put in the trunk of a car by the FBI and driven around the forest just because they didn't want to pay up to the local director and his network of cronies. Or we all know of a prominent local case of a murderer or rapist that was released from prison (without any legal basis), then went on to fight a war for 6 months, then came back to our city with new military experience, now knowing how to handle rifles, grenades and man portable rocket launchers, and with severe PTSD. /s
- gtirloni 3y ago50% discount for Russian oil oligarchs. I guess they really think Russia will continue to cut ties with the rest of the world for a very long time and are cutting their losses now.
- golergka 3y ago50% discount is just the official rule. If they tried to acquire it on a real market, they would likely have to pay much more.
- whimsicalism 3y agoor there are penalties that they are about to start running into
- threeseed 3y agoThis is likely related to the US imposing secondary sanctions early this year. Yandex would lose access to their US/EU bank accounts if they were still operating in Russia.
- Throw73747 3y agoNot just that. Russia is going to confiscate all Western assets in Russia as a counter measure. Valued roughly at 200B USD, mainly owned by EU countries. Yandex would lose their Russian business in any case.
- throwaway_20357 3y agoI think there is little hope of normalizing relations with Russia, so unfortunately these "Western assets" need to be written off anyway. A large part of them ($98bn) came from Cyprus which might just be round-tripping Russian money.
- roenxi 3y ago> I think there is little hope of normalizing relations with Russia After 9/11, the US maintained productive relations with the Saudis. They're actively supporting Israel through the Gaza business. They have a long history of propping up dictators and thrashing countries for hard-to-articulate reasons (I still don't get exactly what the point of Afghanistan or Iraq was, even accepting the blunt "oil" that is sometimes given out). I don't see why relations with Russia aren't normalised now. As can be seen in this very announcement (suddenly international deals are being handled in Yuan), the US appears hell-bent on taking Russia and China then welding them together. That seems wildly stupid to me and personally I think it is a serious foreign policy blunder. The US should have sought a quick peace in Ukraine and normalised relations immediately.
- sorenjan 3y agoThe US sought a quick peace in Ukraine, they even asked Russia to not invade even before Russia started their invasion. You can't get much quicker than before the events have taken place. It didn't work because Russia isn't interested in peace, but that's not the US' fault.
- kaaaate 3y agohttps://archive.is/Gghfq https://archive.is/Gghfq
- trompetenaccoun 3y ago>(Russian Google) Are there people here who don't know Yandex? Genuinely curious, if you didn't know what it is I'd like to hear from you.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 3y agoYou're over-estimating how many people actually "surf" the net. I'd wager most of HN knows Yandex, but you're average, non-tech industry, person in NA has essentially no need or situation when they would run into Yandex (aside from streaming, even then they probably aren't explicitly going to the yandex url). You would see the same case for a Chinese search engine. People in general spend a remarkable amount of time visiting the same 3-4 websites over and over and some apps.
- charcircuit 3y ago>but you're average, non-tech industry, person in NA has essentially no need or situation when they would run into Yandex They have the most popular reverse image search tool now that Google got rid of theirs
- angra_mainyu 3y agoYep, and surprisingly good too (I use it daily).
- kristiandupont 3y agoWhat are those searches? I am curious because I've used reverse image search 3-4 times in my life. It's just not something I think of..
- charcircuit 3y agoThe most normal use case is finding the original, higher resolution version of an image.
- thriftwy 3y agoMore like Alphabet selling off its Google and downscaling two orders of magnitude. Don't think it will get the cash, it probably has obligations for almost every cent, so this would be a virtual deal mostly.
- rat9988 3y agoIt has nothing to do with google and alphabet. Apart from being a good search engine and a competitor within the same space.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vlovich123 3y agoOP is describing it as an analogy of what the equivalent action by Alphabet would be and it’s pretty accurate - Yandex search remains in Moscow while the rest of Yandex operations (eg cloud) remains in the EU.
- thriftwy 3y ago95% of what Yandex N.V. owns is ООО Яндекс business in Russia. I don't even believe they are keeping Yandex assets in Belarus and Kazakhstan. So that becomes a box that is mostly empty. I don't believe anybody is going to pay for actual Yandex Cloud in Europe where they have AWS and Hetzner. So even Russia-based Yandex Cloud with actual racks and users remains in Moscow. What they may keep is vague "cloud technologies" and Clickhouse. Still, these are not a large business. Think VMWare and MongoDB combined. Please correct me if you know more. Their self-driving stuff, was also mostly used in Moscow. Genuinely hope they would find customers, such as Hyundai.
- skotobaza 3y agoClickHouse is a separate company now as far as I know.
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- thrdbndndn 3y agoDang: please edit the link to the actual press, https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024&id=05-02-2024 https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024&id=05-02-2024, not the index page for the year 2024.
- laplab 3y agoThanks for pointing that out, my mistake. Unfortunately, I can only edit the title, not the link
- dang 3y agoNot your mistake! see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39267031 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39267031.
- Aissen 3y agoThis does nothing, if you want dang to help, use the email address in the bottom Contact footer.
- MuffinFlavored 3y agoI'm not 100% sure if behind the scenes he has some sort of @dang webhook alert/filter or if he skims comments regularly
- dang 3y agoI skim comments regularly but it's still pretty random what I see. The only way to reliably get a message to us is hn@ycombinator.com. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- dang 3y agoThat was the submitted URL but our software replaced that with the canonical URL listed by the page (https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024 https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024). Reversed now. Thanks!
- netsharc 3y agoActual content: https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024&id=05-02-2024 https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024&id=05-02-2024
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoGood, I use yandex mail and search and I would mind if it died. Mail is a no nonsense mail provider, and works everywhere my own tld address is rejected by stupid forms. And yandex censorship is different than google censorship, so the venn diagam of what you can find with both is pretty good.
- alephnerd 3y agoMail.ru will be owned by the Russian consortium as well. This divestment is to split their startups and a couple EU based assets from their Russian ones.
- nextaccountic 3y ago> yandex censorship is different than google censorship That's exactly it We shouldn't have so few search providers in any case
- misterioss 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- severino 3y agoI wonder how will Yandex Mail work after this (or maybe currently?) in regards to data protection. I know there exists mail.yandex.com and mail.yandex.ru... is the former, or will it be, based in the Netherlands, meaning that access from western countries with a court order would be granted?
- alephnerd 3y agoYandex Mail is part of the Russian business that is getting divested based on the press release. Yandex is basically splitting it's Russian assets (Search, Mail) from it's EU assets (a couple moonshots and a DC). It looks more like a Russian company divesting from the EU than the other way around tbh. "The Purchaser consortium, led by members of the senior management team of our Russian businesses" "YNV will retain a portfolio of international businesses and other non-Russian assets, including four early-stage technology businesses and other assets: - Nebius AI, an AI cloud platform that is one of the largest providers of GPU capacity in Europe; - Toloka AI, a data solutions partner for GenAI and Large Language Model development; - Avride, one of the leading developers of self-driving technologies; - TripleTen, an EdTech service that equips people with in-demand tech skills; - our data center located in Finland; and minority investments in other technology businesses." [0] [0] - https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024&id=05-02-2024 https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024&id=05-02-2024
- Hamuko 3y agoI wonder how the Finnish data center is doing. At the start of the invasion, their electricity provider ended their contract and they were running the data centre on diesel alone. https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/05/yandex_datacenter_in_finland/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/05/yandex_datacenter_in_...
- ivan_gammel 3y agoI feel sorry for Volozh, he managed to keep his business for longer than many others. It is interesting that a part of the deal is paid in yuan, probably to avoid Western sanctions. This is the new reality in which Russian businesses do exist now and may be a sign of the fragmentation of the global financial system. Also interesting is that while Volozh now resides in Israel, Yandex was very active in UAE recently with taxi, food and groceries delivery services. I doubt that anything will change because of the massacre in Gaza.
- csomar 3y ago> Also interesting is that while Volozh now resides in Israel, Yandex was very active in UAE UAE is on friendly terms with Israel (at least for now). They have also been aggressively targeting US tech refugees (ie: telegram, binance).
- alephnerd 3y agoThat's not the reason. Around 20% of Israelis immigrated from the Soviet Union 20-30 years ago, and Russia and Ukraine still have fairly large Jewish communities. Volozh is himself Russian Jewish, so it makes sense he decided to take up Israeli citizenship instead of keeping his Russian one. A lot of Ukrainian and Russian Jews did that right after 2022. Dubai has a fairly large CIS diaspora (around 1.5-2% of the entire population) so it's unsurprising that Yandex is fairly popular there. Russian services are decently popular in Israel for similar reasons as well.
- csomar 3y agoI was answering on the assumption that the previous poster was surprised about the UAE/Israel relation. Maybe I misread him.
- ivan_gammel 3y agoNo, I was not surprised. It’s like a flavor of complicated Middle Eastern politics that is interesting to observe.
- sam_goody 3y agoThe only time I ever saw a car without a driver was on a visit to Israel. On the highway to Tel Aviv (intercity - not a side road), there was a car with Yandex Auto Drive (in Hebrew) plastered all over it, driving in the lane next to ours. We had plenty of time to look - there was no driver at all, or they were sitting so low they would not have been able to see the road. Made me realize that some companies fly under the radar and then seem to show up out of nowhere. I never thought of Yandex as anything but search till that moment.
- smugglerFlynn 3y agoThey also own largest Taxi service in Russia (Yandex Taxi), largest food and home goods delivery service (Yandex Lavka), and largest car sharing service (Yandex Drive). Yandex Taxi has been testing self-driving cars in Moscow for years. Interesting to note is that all of these lines of business were created as in-house startups, not through acquisitions. In the local business community they are famous for doing the internal sandboxing and investing just right. However, Yandex has mixed results outside of the Russian market, as far as I'm aware. E.g. former two services are driven locally by extremely low wage workforce from ex-Soviet countries, I'd guess their business model has this ingrained, and just does not work the same in markets with more expensive labor.
- lofaszvanitt 3y agoJust don't fuck up the image search. That's the best tool out there, but in the last few months, it got worse :(.
- bmacho 3y agoGoogle image search went from good to dead in the past ~2 years, first they've hidden the features like search on image, or jump to image, then they completely removed them.
- lofaszvanitt 3y agoFind source now works quite ok with gimg.
- cubefox 3y agoGiven that almost all Yandex business is in Russia, an appropriate headline would be "Yandex gets rid of its European shareholders".
- mathverse 3y agoWonder what happened to Jetbrains. They have a CZ entity but the largest part of the workforce was in Russia.
- jszymborski 3y agoAll their Russian offices were closed, including sales and R&D activities. https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/12/06/update-on-jetbrains-statement-on-ukraine/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/12/06/update-on-jetbrai...
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago"We managed to move out the majority of our people from Russia." Much respect to these guys for their principled stand. Ok, I had let my CLion subscription lapse because I didn't like where they were going with the RustRover/CLion split (I do both C++ and Rust work, and would prefer one tool). But this may make me reconsider.
- guipsp 3y agoThe 'canon' way to do multi-language development is via IntelliJ Ultimate. I have no idea how well it works for rust at the moment, since RustRover is still in pre-release. Update: I gave it a quick go, and it seem to have feature parity with RustRover. Give it a shot if you haven't.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoThe question is what is happening with the Rust plugin generally. The talk was that it wasn't going to be maintained in the future, and instead all the work folded into RustRover itself, and nobody seemed to be clear if Rust had a future in IntelliJ Ultimate but I'm pretty sure the answer is "no" since C++ isn't in there either. I'm 100% sure I'm not on the only team that does both Rust and C++. Rust in CLion was perfect for me. I could get my employer to pay for both, potentially, but I like to have my own licenses for things for the purpose of doing my own open source work independent of my employer, without any ambiguity about IP or potential for conflict. For myself ... the way they handled this (bad communication of roadmap) irritated me enough that I dusted off emacs and got myself set up with a nice configuration with lsp, company, projectile, and treemacs and made myself productive in it.
- vzaliva 3y ago"The consideration will be paid in a combination of: (i) a cash equivalent of at least RUB 230 billion" This money will go to Russian economy and will indirectly support the war. Instead these money should have been frozen in an escrow account and potentially used to rebuild Ukrainian economy.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoAll Yandex's money is already in Russia, in Sberbank or smth. Good luck telling Sberbank to freeze it and send to Ukraine. In this deal, they are salvaging some money and taking it out of Russia.
- secondary_op 3y agoYandex will survive, it is a company that was founded and to this day consists of good values and good people, much has been written about this by independent journalists [1] [2] and by the people at the company [3] [1] Book https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Яндекс_Воложа https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Яндекс_Воложа [2] Book https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Яндекс.Книга https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Яндекс.Книга [3] https://yandex.ru/company/values https://yandex.ru/company/values
- kornhole 3y agoHow do we access the Russian based search engine, and will it still serve English language results? The European business will fall under the Digital Services Act and EU directed content moderation. I sometimes want to see results of independent and foreign sources which Yandex was previously good for providing.
- lykahb 3y agoAny large business in Russia cannot exist independently of the state - even if the relationship is informal. Particularly, if the company is related to mass media and surveillance. Yandex is a state-controlled company even if the legal structure doesn't indicate this. I would interpret this divestment as Russian intention to use Yandex as a tool for doing foreign influence, similar to RT or their social networks manipulation. It should be sanctioned.
- EasyMark 3y agoYeah I can't imagine the Russian police state passing up on eavesdropping on all search and activity there, it's simply too valuable as an intelligence asset and there is nothing that any yandex employees residing in Russia could do about it without risking being imprisoned/disappeared
- user3939382 3y agoWe set a good example with our NSA data center in Utah siphoning off the data of all Americans.
- skotobaza 3y ago> Any large business in Russia cannot exist independently of the state Not unlike other countries... Particularly the ones that boast freedom.
- user3939382 3y ago> > Any large business in Russia cannot exist independently of the state Meanwhile US congress is 100% captured by corporate interests, especially the arms industry.
- ByQuyzzy 3y ago[dead]