Battle of ecosystems: Yandex and Sberbank entered into the struggle for every Russian

The main events of the end of the week were the annual events of two companies that are going to share the Russian market between their ecosystems in the coming years - the YAC conference, at which Yandex spoke about its plans for the conquest of the car market, and the meeting of the shareholders of Sberbank, where Herman Gref spoke about the successes in the transformation of Sberbank into a technological company. In fact, both go to the same goal - technological dominance in the daily life of customers, but from different ends: Yandex - from online to offline, Sberbank - from offline to online.

Photo: Alexander Astafyev/TASS

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Yandex is a classic Internet company whose business was built around media products-from search to news, and monetization was built on an advertising model. Since the mid-2010s, the main goal of the company is to earn more on services, and go offline from online. It is not for nothing that Arkady Volozh in February, presenting the results of 2018, proudly said that the Yandex's non -mammary revenue reached 20%. The main characters of the YAC 2019 conference on Thursday (we analyzed it in detail here ), the Yandex.Avto system, which will be installed on 2 million AvtoVAZ cars, Renault and Nissan, and the voice assistant to Alice, who should connect the online and offline elements of the Yandex ecosystem.

The appointment of Tigran Khudaverdyan, who headed the most successful offline asset of the company - Yandex.Taxi, is logical in the framework of this strategy, the Director of Yandex. At the same time, Yandex tries to stake the largest, but still not fully mastered media segments - music and video stacking .

Sberbank , on the contrary, moves from offline to online and is becoming an increasingly media company. The deal of the year for the bank was the purchase of Rambler (and before it, there were unsuccessful negotiations on the purchase of Yandex, which Gref, however, denies). The most interesting asset in this transaction for Sberbank was the OKKO online cinema, and most of the investment in Rambler will be aimed at buying content, German Gref said today in an interview with Kommersant. Rambler should become a window for all Sberbank ecosystem products. She, as recentlyexplained by The Bell, a member of the Board of Directors of the Bank, the well-known IT investor Leonid Boguslavsky, should become a full-length supermarket with a single identification of customers, which will offer them cross-Benifets in different services. This is somewhat reminiscent of the Yandex.Plus subscription, on the basis of which Yandex combines its services, offering subscribers discounts at the same time by taxi, car sharing, music and video.
One of the main characters of today's shareholders of Sberbank was a robot and digital leading corporate television of Sberbank Elena, developed by the Center for Speech Technologies. In April, Gref Bank paid Gazprombank for control of the Central Bank of at least 5 billion rubles - half as much as Alexander Mamut for Rambler. The transaction will help Sberbank in banking services (recognition of persons and votes for customer identification), and, in the future, in creating his own voice assistant, without which no digital ecosystem from Amazon to Yandex can do. “We will be definitely no worse than Google and Apple,” Gref said at a meeting of shareholders today.

What's next. The starting points of both companies have their own advantage: Yandex has a strong technological examination and the ability to quickly scale its infrastructure in the new market, the Sberbank has a ready -made multi -million dollar base of customers, which are also collected in a single mobile application with a function of payments. This, of course, is Sberbank Online, which in November 2018 had more than 40 million users. This can allow Sberbank to try to use the Super Appendix strategy that unites all the services you need to customers. Thanks to her, Chinese WeChat was able to become a dominant player in the country's market. Now the GRAB and Go-JEK services are going on the same path in Southeast Asia, which began as applications for ordering a taxi.

What am I to me?

The battle of ecosystems will almost inevitably end with the fact that for 5-10 years one of them will win your living space. So far, it seems that Yandex and Sberbank are most likely to play this role in Russia.