Yandex officially announced its IPO

The parent company of the Internet company Yandex, Yandex NV, on Thursday, April 28, officially announced its intention to conduct an IPO on the American NASDAQ exchange. This is reported in the company's press release . Yandex NV also filed an application for listing of ordinary shares in the NASDAQ Global Market section. It is noted that the number of shares and the offer range have not yet been determined.

Previously, investors estimated the value of Yandex at 6-9 billion dollars. The company's net profit at the end of 2010 amounted to $134 million, in the first quarter of 2011 it was $28.8 million.

In November 2009, the IPO was held by Mail.ru Group, which competes with Yandex in the Russian segment of the Internet. The company was valued at $5.71 billion. Mail.ru Group managed to gain about a billion dollars for the sale of 18.4 percent of shares.

Experts explained that the preliminary valuation of Yandex is higher than the market valuation of its competitor due to the fact that the contextual advertising market, on which the search engine earns money, is developing much faster than the market for media advertising and paid services, which is the domain of the Mail.ru Group. It is worth noting that 88% of Yandex's revenue in 2010 came from contextual advertising (revenue amounted to $439.7 million). The company noted that sales of this type of advertising increased by 45% compared to last year. In addition, Yandex, unlike many of its competitors, was already paying dividends on shares.

Yandex is the largest Russian Internet search engine. Last May, the company went international by launching an English-language version of its search engine on the domain www.yandex.com. As of December 2009, Yandex is the seventh largest search site in the world in terms of the number of search queries processed.