Yandex is planning to leave its homeland of Russia: because of Vladimir Putin!

Yandex, which had a difficult time due to Russia’s war with Ukraine, needs to recover in terms of financial competence and brand prestige. The popular search engine service is gearing up to separate some of its intellectual property from its home country and divest everything else.

Yandex issued a press release

Yandex, which has been influential in the advertising, e-commerce, self-driving car and cloud technology sectors besides the search engine sector, is currently headquartered in the Netherlands.

In the related press release, it was stated that due to the current geopolitical environment in Russia, a strategic process has been initiated to review options for restructuring Yandex’s ownership and management. A group under the management of Yandex will form a committee to undertake the following tasks:

• To conduct research to develop international departments independent of Russia, which are responsible for the continuity of certain services provided by Yandex (including autonomous driving technologies, cloud computing technology, data labeling and training technology).
• Managed and owned by Yandex’s headquarters and all other Yandex businesses (including search, advertising, mobile, e-commerce, food delivery, technology delivery, entertainment services, and other Yandex services in Russia and international markets) conduct investigations for the disposal of property and managerial control, including the transfer of certain elements.

Stating that this process is a preliminary stage, the Russian-origin search engine stated that it does not have any assurance as to whether the shares planned to be sold will find buyers and does not give any guarantees on this matter.

These plans will be subject to ongoing analysis and shareholder approval. If Yandex implements these plans, it will continue to operate some of its operations in the Netherlands. The remaining services will remain in the hands of Yandex management in Russia.

Yandex will apparently divest many of its exclusive rights. We won’t see Yandex in the auto, cloud storage, education, and data labeling industries, at least for a while.