To Lukoil, of course.
Not Gazprom, those wankers. Lukoil. Beacon of . . y’know . . freedom or some shit. When the state-managed privately-run petroleum conglomerate buys your country’s main search engine, you know it’s a bad day.
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Maybe chasing pots of gold by operating businesses in places where the law is a mere suggestion that can be overridden at the whim of a dictator isn’t such a great idea after all.
Probably not the conclusion they’ll arrive at; the correct people already got rich off this bullshit.
Russia was a very different country when Yandex started out. For as terrible as things were in the '90s for most Russians, there was a newfound sense of freedom for the first time in Russian history, accompanied by a cultural explosion and a similarly vibrant startup culture.
China experienced a brief period of far more restrictive, but still previously unheard of freedom when the tech companies that now dominate its part of the Internet started out. It didn’t last, Xi quickly killed it off once he took the throne, but the country is still benefiting from these small handful of years, not realizing quite yet what they have lost.
Are you expecting companies that were created during such times to just shut down once their countries slide back into totalitarianism?
I expect them to do what Google did: see the way the winds are blowing and get out before their assets are seized or their leadership disappeared. It’s not like these are sudden shifts. The decline of both states toward increasing totalitarianism has been happening for at least 15 years.
In the case of Russia at least, the frog was boiled very slowly, slow enough that if you wanted to, you were able to deny it for many years.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The price reflects a 50% discount that Moscow imposes on companies from “unfriendly” countries like the Netherlands as a condition of exiting business in Russia, according to a statement Monday from Nasdaq-exchange listed Yandex NV.
It follows drawn-out negotiations that show the complexities international companies must navigate if they want to unload their Russian businesses, which many have been struggling to do since President Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the sweeping financial and economic sanctions that followed.
Yandex, founded in 1997 as Russia’s answer to Google and Yahoo, serves Russian-speaking customers through its search engine and with widely used apps for food delivery, car-sharing and shopping.
After the sale, Yandex NV would be left with its international businesses — employing 1,300 people — including self-driving technology and generative artificial intelligence as well as a data center in Finland.
Companies fleeing Russia not long after the war began ended joint ventures and wrote off stakes worth billions.
For instance, McDonald’s sold its 850 restaurants to a local franchisee, while France’s Renault took a symbolic single ruble for its majority stake in Avtovaz, Russia’s largest carmaker.
The original article contains 619 words, the summary contains 187 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I didn’t know Yandex was Dutch!
Kind of. Parent company is based in Netherlands since 2007. Yandex search engine was launched on 1997.
Me neither! This was news to me. For no reason I always thought it was a Russian company.
