Departure of employees, default risk and burned options. What happens to Yandex?

The topic of release - what happens to Yandex

The largest Russian IT company, due to the “special operation”, was on the verge of default, its general director-under sanctions, and the options of thousands of employees were resetting one day. Yandex suspended or reduced investments in new projects in Russia and abroad, got rid of the most toxic assets and examined more than a dozen business restructuring options. We tell how the company spent two months from the moment of the beginning of the military operations of Russia in Ukraine.

Departure of employees

After February 24, Yandex employees left Russia with whole charters. In the first weeks, more than two thousand people left the country - of which about 800 were in Turkey, many went to Armenia, Georgia and Israel. Since then, hundreds of people managed to return, the source close to the company has been saying, now less than 10% of about 19 thousand employees of Yandex remain abroad.

On March 15, the managing director of the group Tigran Khudardyan, on the day of the “special operation”, invited to the Kremlin to meet with Vladimir Putin, got into the sanctions lists of the European Union. Soon after the introduction of personal sanctions, he left his post and from the board of directors. In early April, the general director of the company in Russia and the HR director Elena Bunina reported to the employees about the ambulance-she went on vacation before the war, and then decided not to return. Since then, the company decided to leave the leaders of several more directions. According to the two interlocutors of The Bell, Roman Chernin, the head of the geoservice, is now conveyed by the case. The head of the Fintekh of Yandex Anton of the Seamless left Russia. The head of the search, advertising and cloud services of Yandex, Andrei Eyskin, left his post.

Oyskin is on a two-month vacation, but remains in the company and helps on key issues, the post of head of the business group of search, advertising services and cloud technologies was occupied by Peter Popov, who worked for the CTO “Search”, the Yandex press service said in response to The Bell's request. Chernin continues to work in the company and help their teams, but they transfer part of their projects to other people, Bunin continues to be responsible for HR and educational projects, the representative of Yandex said.

In mid -April, the head of the media services Artem Savinovsky was appointed the new general director of Yandex in Russia in Russia. Khudardyan, who recently celebrated 16 years of work in the company, after leaving all the posts, remained one of the participants in the collegial governing body, which includes several top managers. This body has existed in the company for many years and is responsible for the main issues of development. They did not come up with any special role for him in the company. “Now his position is officially called“ Tigran ”,” says a source in the company.

Employees of some departments, for example, the portal team, remained in Russia almost in full force, but the internal social network of Yandex is still full of messages in the spirit of “I rent an apartment in Moscow”. Most of those who left settled in Yerevan, in second place - Tbilisi, several employees of the company say. “I like Yandex, I would not want to leave here. If suddenly it happens that some part of the company will be able to live its life abroad, I would like to work in it because “Yandex” are surprisingly good people. But if this does not happen, you will have to go further, ”says one of the employees who left.

Some people quit, someone else will leave, but Yandex always hired and raised strong people, the company will be able to replace them-a letter of approximately the maintenance of Khudardyan recently sent their colleagues. But the situation is nervous and the project teams and the leadership remaining in the country, which periodically “makes it clear that it is time to determine and cannot continue,” says one of the employees.

Burnt options

Options have more than half of Yandex employees. After the company’s shares on NYSE and NASDAQ were suspended at the end of February, their accumulations were actually reset.

Yandex had an attractive compensation system. The income of many employees was divided into two parts: ruble salary and dollar options, two interlocutors of The Bell say. “It turned out that income was protected from currency fluctuations. And the higher was Graid [position in the company. - The Bell], the most part of the income was occupied by options. Often it was much more than half, ”says one of them. “When everything happened, part of the income simply evaporated, including the most expensive developers, which are hunted by the largest companies in the world and who always have two or three offers.” It turned out that the most loyal employees lost the most: those who lived on a ruble salary, held stocks and worked for the growth of the company, at one point remained without everything, adds another.

In order to somehow compensate for these losses, Yandex paid an additional salary in March in March. As a result, for the first quarter, the company spent almost 6 billion rubles on this, follows from the reporting. The motivation program based on RSU (Restricted Stock Units) is the right to freely receive a certain number of shares. In Yandex, it covers about 60% of the employees, the company’s press service said: “Due to the impossibility of the rural and sale of RSU in the current conditions, we switched to the scheme of cash payments. The calculation is made at the recorded exchange rate (above the current) and the price of shares in dollars, which was used during the payment of the grant to a specific employee. Thus, we continue to maintain the total income of employees at a competitive level. ”

After almost two months that have passed since the trading stop, the information about when the ban on applying to the United States of the Yandex receipt and other Russian companies can be removed and whether it will happen at all - Yandex warned investors this week. The company considers different options to provide shareholders with the opportunity to trade shares, including listing on another international stock exchange, the report said.

Delistral with the converting of receipts in the promotion on the Mosbirzh would allow employees to compensate at least part of the losses due to the sale of papers, one of the interlocutors of The Bell reason. But in this scenarios, Western investors, still cut off from participation in Russian tenders, run the risk of losing. There are no solutions on how the company will get out of the situation, now its financiers are working, a source close to the company says.

The risk of default

A few days after freezing the shares of Russian companies in the United States, Yandex warned investors about the risk of default: if the auction stops for more than five days, holders of all bonds issued by the company can demand repayment. This means that at the same time the company may need about $ 1.25 billion.

The company has not warned money to repay all obligations in Yandex in early March. A few days later, holders about 70% of bonds united , hired consultants and demanded that the company prematurely pay off the debt, soon another 20% of Bondholders joined them, Bloomberg wrote.

Negotiations on restructuring should be completed after the May holidays, but Yandex has already offered to extend them. There are no agreements yet, but the fact of negotiations says that lenders are not ready to go to extreme measures, he argues. In case of bankruptcy of the Dutch Yandex NV, they “with great hemorrhoids” will receive only part of their funds, then they can try to get to the share of Yandex in some companies abroad, but “go now sell them now”.

For Yandex itself, non -fulfillment of obligations will mean that all its external operations will be blocked by bond holders until the debt is repaid - and this scenario in the company would like to avoid, he says.

Why does Yandex not share

Yandex is a hostage of its structure for a long time. “And in the best times, the Dutch company selling Nasdaq and having the main business in Russia raised many questions. Now these issues have become completely big, ”says one of The Bell's interlocutors.

In 2009, Yandex acquired a “golden action” in 2009, which made it possible to block the purchase of 25% of the company's votes, then it received Sberbank. 11 years after the relations of the IT company and the State Bank finally deteriorated, they came up with a new structure for the management of Yandex: the Fund of Public Interests (FOI). After the last attack of the state on Yandex in the fall of 2019, FOI received the right to control the decisions of the Internet company, which may affect national security (we talked about this in detail here ).

The company has a consensus that the current business management structure will have to be changed, a source close to the leadership of Yandex says. “18 options for possible restructuring were discussed, but everyone rested on certain problems. Now we have come to a point when we decided that we would not do anything until there was more certainty - in particular, the issue with bondholders will not be resolved, ”he claims.

“Until now, there was an approach: we can, sitting in Russia, develop something throughout the world. Yandex had a positioning strategy in other countries, and although it was difficult, but this approach worked. Now there is no more chance of this, ”says one of The Bell's interlocutors. Formally, all the assets of the company can be divided into two groups: purely Russian Yandex and foreign projects, whose fate is still unknown, he continues. This week, Medusa (recognized by the Ministry of Justice of the Ino -Agent) wrote that Yandex is preparing to divide the company into two: Russian and international. But six The Bell interlocutors in the top management of the IT company claim that this is not so.

““ Yandex ”has always been a confederation, all businesses and services in which have always been quite independent. So it remains now, ”explains one of The Bell's interlocutors. It is impossible to talk about the division of the company into two Yandex for many reasons: for example, more than 90% of intellectual property in Russia, another adds. In addition, any disconnection, until the problem with bondholders is resolved, can be qualified as the withdrawal of assets.

In the future, small projects may well “shoot” from the large “Yandex” and live in their own life, as it was in the case of Clickhouse, one of The Bell believes. Clickhouse is a database management system that was originally written for Yandex.Metriki. A year and a half ago, American funds Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures invited Yandex to create a new business, leaving the Yandex technology at the heart. Now Clickhouse is actually not related to Yandex, which remains in the startup only by the minority. The services of the company use Uber, Spotify and Alibaba, and its estimate is already about $ 2 billion.

The most strongly in the Yandex international market is presented by its taxi service under the Yango brand. Before the war, the service managed to enter the markets of 19 countries, including European Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. A noticeable share in the foreign business of the company's taxi was the African market, the interlocutors of The Bell inside the company say. For example, the service has been working in the cat d'Ivoire and Ghana for several years, and at the end of last year he started in Senegal and Cameroon.

In 2021, every fourth Taxi trip was made abroad: that is, out of 2.4 billion trips, about 600 million did not happen in Russia. The company does not disclose other results of its foreign business.

In parallel with the Yandex taxi, he actively developed abroad and logistics service under the Yango Delivery brand. Somewhere they work in parallel, and somewhere-independently, as, for example, in Latin America, where the service launched in Chile and Peru. Prior to the start of the “special operation”, the company also launched in Paris, London and Israel the Lavka, the service of express foods under the Yango Deli brand.

Now there is an overkill of different strategies. The main question is how to structure business so that American or European partners can continue to work with the company in third countries. For example, a taxi business in Africa has already encountered problems. Google and Facebook-the main search engine and social network for the region-at some point turned off the advertisement of the Russian taxi aggregator, says one of The Bell's interlocutors. Legally, this business was framed by the Dutch maternal company of Yandex, which ultimately avoided stopping all marketing in the region, he says, but “it is obvious that Yandex will now put pressure on all the international activity of Yandex.”

“After it all ends, we will have to change everything,” the interlocutor of The Bell argues in the Yandex leadership: some international businesses will be able to work according to the alliance model, some like a taxi in Africa-it is likely to continue to do something from Russia, that Yandex can definitely not be made abroad, the company may try to sell or close.

Optimization of the structure is a process that takes place in any companies almost continuously, the Yandex press service said. There are no plans to disconnect specific projects as spin-offs, to close or sell parts of the foreign business of the group yet, the company said. “But earlier we talked, for example, about the suspension of the work of Yango Deli in Paris. It was a pilot project with a small number of darcsters, and it did not live up to our internal expectations, ”the company explained.

“The headquarters of Yandex is in Moscow, and there are no plans to transfer it,” the press service added. - At the same time, we have many offices in different countries, and we hope to preserve them. As for the brand - some of the foreign services are already working under the Yango brand, there are no rebranding plans. ”

The only assets that Yandex has already got rid of was the toxic media services “News” and “Zen”. This week they were acquired bythe actual state VK, but nothing is known about the terms of the transaction. Two interlocutors of The Bell, familiar with its details, claim that the negotiations were difficult: Yandex wanted to get rid of these assets as soon as possible, and VK was very concerned about the issue of recommendatory algorithms and traffic, without which Zen and News are not particularly valuable. Now the VK will integrate the purchased assets into its own recommendation services, such as the “pulse” for “Zen” and the “Actual” tab on VKontakte for “News”, the interlocutors of Kommersant in the market believe .

The very possibility of the further existence of Yandex depended strategically on the sale of “news” and “Zen”, a source close to the company says. Yandex could simply not close the media projects, since for many years they have been closely following the presidential administration. Back in 2016, the company refused to work with the media that did not have a license from Roskomnadzor. Including, because of the “news”, Khudardyan was in the sanction list of the European Union: the EU documentation provides the words of the ex-head of the Lev Gershenzon service, who called Yandex the key element “in the concealment of information about the war”.

Volozha factor

This week it became known about the change of owner of several large Russian companies at once, and, probably, this is only the beginning. Among the other new largest shareholder, he found the most successful Russian bank - Tinkoff. Oleg Tinkov’s family, the family sold his 35% to Vladimir Potanin. Even before the transaction, Kommersant wrote that Tinkov could sell his package for $ 300 million - eight times cheaper than the market value of the package on the Moscow Exchange and 6.5 times cheaper than it was estimated for the failed transaction with Yandex in 2020.

The founder of Yandex Arkady Volozh (owns 45.5% of the company's voting shares and 8.7% of the economic share), it would probably also be morally ready to “turn the page” and get rid of Russian assets, two acquaintances believe. But unlike Tinkov, it will not be so simple to make this Volozh. After the last attack of the state on Yandex at the end of 2019, Volozh handed over his package to the family trust, which pledged not to sell paper for a certain time. Last year, the trust was extended by Lock UP to 100% of class B shares (about 30.8 million shares, 10 votes each) for two years - until December 31, 2023.

The difficulty lies in the fact that when selling a Trust package, these shares automatically cease to be super -voting, and then the company’s control will actually be among foreign minority of Yandex from among large American funds, which the Russian authorities definitely will not want to allow, one of the interlocutors of The Bell explains.

In this situation, Volozh “will not leave a company that he built for so many years,” another is sure. “I think he, of course, is upset, but he is not Oleg [Tinkov] and would not sell on emotions,” he says. “But after it ends, he will have to think about how to change and restructure everything.”

One of the ideas of restructuring was the creation of a fund or other structure, which, under the leadership of Volozh, could engage in international projects, says one of The Bell's interlocutors. The press service of Yandex answered this that

“Arkady has been focused on international projects“ Yandex ”for several years and plans to continue to engage in them.”

In recent years, a management system has developed in Yandex, in which Khudardyan was responsible for all Russian business, and Volozh moved away from operating rooms and developed international projects, says the interlocutor of The Bell in the company's management. “Arkady, for example, has been flying around the world for the past year and a half to collect the international alliance on cloud technologies,” he says. “The idea was to collect the pool of states outside Europe and the USA, which are interested in their own cloud systems, but do not have a technological stack.” Now this project and other international initiatives Volozh have paused.