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Russian Expands Its Local Search Dominance

By  |  November 3, 2022

Russian internet giant Yandex said it had expanded its dominant share of the domestic search market.

Yandex in August agreed to sell its news aggregator, content platform Zen and homepage yandex.ru to Russian state-controlled VK in a move that is expected to tighten the government’s grip on the internet, but Yandex’s stranglehold on online searches has grown, accounting for a little under half of its revenue.

Yandex has, like many Russian companies, endured a turbulent year. It plunged to a first-quarter loss and its shares tumbled to six-year lows before trading was suspended in late February, shortly after Moscow sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine. Revenue and profits have since recovered.

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“Current geopolitical tensions and their impact on the Russian and global economy have created an exceptionally challenging environment for our business, team and shareholders,” Yandex said in a statement.

Yandex said revenue growth was mainly driven by improvements in ad technologies and “changes in (the) competitive landscape, which led to an increase of our market share compared to last year.”