Last week, Yandex, one of biggest search and advertising companies in Russia, announced that it would be teaming up with Microsoft, Nokia, HTC and Samsung to become the default search engine on both new and upcoming Windows Phones in Russia. This followed the news last month that Yandex is also set to become the search provider for bada-powered smartphones in Russia and the CIS. It’s been a good last few months for Yandex, as Robin pointed out last week, the company has steadily grown its share of the Russian search market to a point where it now owns 62.7 percent of the market in Q3 2011 — ahead of Google.

Today, the Russian search giant has announced another strategic move in its mobile strategy, as it has acquired SPB Software, a developer of mobile software that makes its home in Russia, Taiwan, and Thailand. As for the price, sources close to the deal say that it was set at approximately $38 million.

SPB was founded in 1999 and was originally focused on making applications and software for Android and Windows mobile devices, from games to productivity apps, but has since become cross-platform, and today offers a more robust suite of mobile solutions. These products include a mobile wallet, data traffic analytics, games, web TV integration, a mobile UI builder, etc.

But, according to Yandex Spokesman Ochir Mandzhikov, what was particularly of interest was the company’s new mobile UI engine for both smartphones and tablets, especially SPB’s “Shell 3D” product, which will be used to integrate Yandex’s cloud services and technologies. This is an important play for Yandex because it allows the company to integrate their search and ad services into a UI which can then be distributed across a multitude of mobile platforms. What’s more, using SPB’s mobile UI builder and toolset, OEMS and brands can customize skins, layout, widgets and 3D animation.

For more on SPB, visit them at home, and for more on SPB Shell 3D, check out the video below:

Yandex, the Russian online search and advertising giant, has teamed up with Microsoft, Nokia, HTC and Samsung to become the default search engine on the latest – and upcoming – Windows Phone smartphones in Russia.

Yandex’s search engine is currently installed on Samsung’s Оmnia W, which is already on sale in Russia, as well as on Nokia’s Windows Phone-powered Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 smartphones, which will hit stores in December.

Following the launch of Windows Phone-based Titan, Mozart and Radar smartphones last autumn, HTC is also planning an update release with Yandex as the default search engine on its handsets.

The news comes on the heels of the announcement last month that Yandex became the main search provider on bada-powered smartphones available in Russia and the CIS.

Yandex points out it has already developed some apps for Windows Phone, including mapping service Yandex.Maps and online marketplace Yandex.Market, and that it will build more applications for the platform and other mobile operating systems in the future.

According to LiveInternet data, Yandex’s share of the Russian search market averaged 62.7 percent in Q3 2011, trumping Google by a margin. The company, which raised over $1.4 billion in a NASDAQ IPO earlier this year, recently reported revenues of RUR 5.2 billion ($161.9 million) for the third quarter of this year, up 65 percent compared with Q3 2010.

Aside from Russia, Yandex also operates in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Turkey.

Russian online search and advertising juggernaut Yandex this morning reported solid quarterly earnings, showing off increases in both revenues and net income, compared to 2010.

The company, which raised over $1.4 billion in a NASDAQ IPO earlier this year, reported revenues of RUR 5.2 billion ($161.9 million), up 65 percent compared with Q3 2010.

Net income jumped 93 percent to RUR 1.7 billion ($53.5 million) compared to the third quarter of 2010, beating forecasts.

According to LiveInternet data, Yandex’s share of the Russian search market averaged 62.7 percent in Q3 2011, trumping Google by a margin. The company also reports that its number of advertisers have increased by more than 48 percent compared to Q3 2010, clocking in at over 158,000.

Yandex recently acquired a social news startup called The Tweeted Times and put up half of a $30 million funding round for alternative search engine Blekko.

The company’s price per share is $25.79 before market open, giving Yandex a market cap of roughly $8.3 billion.

Yandex, one of the leading Internet companies in Russia, has acquired startup venture The Tweeted Times, which enables people to create custom online ‘newspapers’ generated from their Twitter accounts. Financial terms of the purchase were not disclosed, but Yandex says it aims to continue offering the social news service and that the entire The Tweeted Times team will be joining the search engine company.

The Tweeted Times was co-founded by Maxim Grinev and Maria Grineva, both computer scientists at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and others.

Its users include celebrities like Snoop Dogg, Alyssa Milano and Lance Weiler.

Yandex, which went public last May and is currently valued at just shy of $10 billion, plans to use technologies acquired from The Tweeted Times to boost its search and content services with information from social networks.

This is the third company Yandex has acquired in the past nine months – its most recent purchases include single sign-in plugin maker Loginza and WebVisor’s behavior analysis technology and team.

The Tweeted Times, formerly called Twitter Times, competes with social news curation service Paper.li, which has itself raised over $2 million in financing.

Another company operating in this space is Summify.

LINKEDIN (NYSE:LNKD)

Professional social network LinkedIn probably had the biggest IPO in terms of hype this year because it was one of the first big social media companies to go public. After pricing its IPO at $45 per share on the New York Stock Exchange, LinkedIn began trading at $83.00 per share on May 19, giving the company a $7.8 billion market cap. In the first day of trading, shares popped up to as high as $122.70, soaring past a $10 billion valuation.

But these high stock prices didn’t sustain and LinkedIn’s value per share dropped significantly over the next month, dropping as low as $63.71 per share. However, the company’s stock rebounded last week, with shares rising as high as $95.50 on Friday, eventually closing at $94.54. That’s a 110 percent increase from its initial pricing.

PANDORA (NYSE:P)

Similar to LinkedIn, music streaming service Pandora also drew considerable attention to its IPO, which debuted on the New York Stock Exchange under the desirable, single character symbol ‘P.’ The company priced its IPO at $16 per share (valuing the company at $2.6 billion), but opened at $20 per share on June 15 (up 25 percent), valuing the company at $3.2 billion.

In the two weeks following the IPO, Pandora’s stock took a bit of a dive, reaching as low as $12.16 per share. But like LinkedIn, Pandora’s shares saw an uptick over the past week, closing at $20.04 on Friday, which is up 25 percent from the company’s initial pricing in June.

YANDEX (NASDAQ:YNDX)

Russian search engine Yandex, which began trading on the NASDAQ on May 24, priced its IPO at $25 per share, but opened at $35, giving Yandex a market cap of roughly $11.2 billion. That’s a bigger market cap than both LinkedIn and Pandora.

Yandex has experienced highs and lows in the past month with the value of its stock, but the fluctuations have not been nearly as extreme as some of its contemporaries in the tech IPO market. Yandex’s stock dipped to a low of $29.73 in mid-June but rebounded quickly and closed on Friday at $35.69, which is a 40 percent increase from its initial pricing.

FUSION-IO (NYSE:FIO)

Fusion-io, the developer of flash- memory technology for companies, debuted on the New York Stock Exchange on June 9. The company priced its IPO at $19 per share, valuing Fusion-io at $1.5 billion, but opened at $25 per share, giving the company a nearly $2 billion market cap.

Fusion-io’s stock has performed fairly well over the past month, reaching a high of $36.32 last week. The company’s shares closed at $31.19 on Friday, up 64 percent from its initial pricing.

HOMEAWAY (NASDAQ:AWAY)

Vacation home rental service HomeAway debuted its IPO last week, pricing at $27 per share. HomeAway, which listed on the NASDAQ, saw its shares pop over 30 percent in initial trading last Wednesday, giving the rental service as valuation of $3 billion.

HomeAway’s shares have maintained its value, relatively speaking, in its first week of trading, reaching a low of $34.92 and a high of $42.30. On Friday, HomeAway’s shares closed at $38.42, a 42 percent increase from the stock’s pricing.

RENREN (NYSE:RENN)

Chinese social network Renren actually went public before LinkedIn, pricing its IPO in early May at $14 per share, with a total offering size of $743.4 million. The company was pitching itself as a “Facebook” like site for the Chinese market, which resulted in an increase in the share price range from the initial $9-$11 to $12-$14. That increase resulted in a boost in the deal size to $743.4 million from the original price of $584 million.

RenRen opened at $18 per share, but the stock has since plummeted to as low as $6.23 per share. On Friday, RenRen closed at $9.25 per share, which is a 34 percent drop in value from the initial pricing.

BANKRATE (NYSE:RATE)

Bankrate provides free rate information to consumers on more than 300 financial products, including mortgages, credit cards, new and used automobile loans, and more. The company priced its IPO at $15 per share, valuing the company at $1.5 billion. The company’s shares, which began trading in mid-June, have remained fairly steady at this price, reaching a high of $17.89. Bankrate closed at $17.13 per share on Friday, up 13 percent.

Who’s Next Up To IPO

Zillow: Real estate listings giant Zillow filed its S-1 in April, so we could be seeing the company hit the public markets in the next two months. Zillow wants to raise $51.75 million in the offering, and while revenue has grown for the company year over year, Zillow has taked a loss for the past three years. Zillow will trade on the NASDAQ under the symbol “Z.”

Kayak: Travel search engine Kayak filed its S-1 last November, aiming to raise $50 million. No word on when the search engine is planning to IPO, but Kayak did reveal revenue growth in the past year, however net income is down. The company will trade on the NASDAQ under the symbol “KYAK.”

Groupon: Daily deals giant Groupon just filed its S-1 in June, aiming to raise $750 million in the public offering. Though the company has an impressive revenue run rate of $2.6 billion for 2011, but has drawn criticism for a lack of profits and the fact that the founders have taken a significant amount of money off the table. The company is looking at an IPO in the Fall.

Zynga: Zynga just filed for its $1 billion IPO this past Friday, revealing impressive financials. Revenues grew 392 percent in 2010, up from $121.5 million in 2009. In the first quarter of 2011 alone, the company’s revenues reached $235 million (or a $940 million revenue run-rate), which is up 134 percent from the first quarter of 2010. Both Zynga and Groupon may be rushing to IPO ahead of Facebook, which is expected to file in the coming year.

Not Yet Filed, But Champing At The Bit:

Facebook: We know an IPO is in the works for Facebook, it’s just a matter of when. The company has been meeting with bankers to discuss IPO size and time frame for an offering. And the company just added Netflix founder and CEO (and an IPO veteran) Reed Hastings to its board. It’s been thought that the social network will go public by April 2012, but it could happen before this date.

Glam Media: We’ve heard Glam Media, one of the largest publishing and advertising networks on the Web, is planning to file for an IPO as early as this Fall. The company has hit $100 million in annual revenue, reaches 90 million people a month in the U.S., and is in the process of hiring bankers to lead its offering.

Yelp: Online reviews and daily deals giant Yelp has its sights set on an IPO, but the timeline is unclear. Yelp is now at 50 million unique visitors per month, mostly in the U.S., and has raised $56 million in funding.

Disclosure: My husband is an employee of Groupon.

After pricing its IPO at $25 per share a few hours before the market opened, the Russian search giant’s share price jumped close to 40% immediately after its flotation.

The price per share opened this morning at $35, giving Yandex a market cap of roughly $11.2 billion at its debut. That means its value currently far surpasses that of LinkedIn, which went public last week (successfully, too).

As Reuters remarked earlier this morning, an IPO at $25 per share would have already valued Yandex at more than 500 times its worth (!) when investors bought into the company back in 2000. Let the “is this a big, medium or small tech bubble” debates begin.

For the sake of comparison, LinkedIn was valued at $7.8 billion when it went public, and boasted a market cap of roughly $8.17 billion when the markets opened this morning.

Yandex, founded in 1997, today operates the most popular search engine and the most visited website in Russia (it is also the largest Russian Internet company by revenue). In 2010, the company generated 64% of all search traffic in Russian, trumping Google.

Yandex is among the largest high-tech companies in Russia, with an estimated workforce of about 2,500 employees. Currently, Yandex has branches all over Russia (Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Kazan), Ukraine (Kiev, Odessa, Simferopol) and in the United States (in Palo Alto, CA, to be exact).

Today, the company joins the likes of Baidu, Google, Cisco, Microsoft and Apple on the NASDAQ stock market. We’ll see how it fares.

We’ll keep tracking Yandex’s share price throughout the day (and beyond, evidently).

(Photos below via freeerror on img.ly and dest1k on yfrog)

Yandex, one of the leading Internet companies in Russia, this morning announced the pricing of its initial public offering of a little under 52.2 million Class A ordinary shares at $25.00 per share.

The shares will begin trading later today on NASDAQ under the symbol “YNDX”.

The offering would give Yandex a market cap of roughly $8 billion.

The company is thus raising a little over $1.3 billion, and has granted its underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 5.2 million shares to cover eventual over-allotments. Earlier this month, Yandex had priced its IPO at $20 to $22 per share.

LinkedIn, which went public last week, had also increased the price per share right before.

Yandex is selling 15.4 million shares (pocketing $385 million), while some of its shareholders are selling an aggregate of roughly 36.8 million shares ($920 million).

Yandex operates the most popular search engine and the most visited website in Russia (it is also the largest Russian Internet company by revenue). In 2010, the company generated 64% of all search traffic in Russian, trumping Google.

In March 2011, Yandex.ru website attracted 38.3 million unique visitors. Aside from Russia, Yandex has operations in Belarus (yandex.by), Kazakhstan (yandex.kz) and Ukraine (yandex.ua). Total revenues for 2010 hovered around $440 million.

Founded back in 1997, Yandex has been reported to be preparing an IPO before, with talks dating back all the way to 2006. In 2008, the company planned for an initial public offering but quickly moved to indefinitely delay those plans due to the global economic turmoil.

Yandex is among the largest high-tech companies in Russia, with an estimated workforce of about 2,500 employees. Currently, Yandex has branches all over Russia (Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Kazan), Ukraine (Kiev, Odessa, Simferopol) and in the United States (in Palo Alto, CA, to be exact).

Yandex proposes to sell 15,400,000 shares in the offering and certain of its shareholders propose to sell an aggregate of 36,774,088 shares. In addition, Yandex and the selling shareholders have granted the underwriters an option to purchase, in aggregate, up to an additional 5,217,405 shares to cover over-allotments, if any. The total amount of shares offered in the filing is 52,174,088 shares.

Basically what this means is that $1.3 billion worth of shares will be sold, with as much as $338 million (at $22 per share) from the IPO going to Yandex and the rest going to the shareholders who sold stock.

Yandex operates the most popular search engine and the most visited website in Russia (it is also the largest Russian Internet company by revenue). In 2010, the company generated 64% of all search traffic in Russian, trumping Google. In March 2011, Yandex.ru website attracted 38.3 million unique visitors. Aside from Russia, Yandex has operations in Belarus (yandex.by), Kazakhstan (yandex.kz) and Ukraine (yandex.ua). Total revenues for 2010 hovered around $440 million. The company says that in the past three years, Yandex generated more than 97% of its revenues from advertising.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the company had been given a preliminary valuation of between $6 billion and $9 billion.

Yandex, one of the leading Internet companies in Russia, this morning announced that it has filed a registration statement with the SEC for a proposed initial public offering, as expected. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the offering have not yet been determined, but the Wall Street Journal recently reported that the company had been given a preliminary valuation of between $6 billion and $9 billion ahead of the filing.

According to the filing, the proposed maximum aggregate offering price amounts to $1 billion, which should give you an indication of how much Yandex seeks to raise.

A portion of the shares will be issued by Yandex, and a portion will be sold by certain of its shareholders. Yandex will list its Class A ordinary shares on NASDAQ (symbol: “YNDX”).

Yandex operates the most popular search engine and the most visited website in Russia (it is also the largest Russian Internet company by revenue). In 2010, the company generated 64% of all search traffic in Russian, trumping Google.

In March 2011, Yandex.ru website attracted 38.3 million unique visitors. Aside from Russia, Yandex has operations in Belarus (yandex.by), Kazakhstan (yandex.kz) and Ukraine (yandex.ua). Total revenues for 2010 hovered around $440 million.

Based on the filing, net income for 2010 was $134 million.

Founded back in 1997, Yandex has been reported to be preparing an IPO before, with talks dating back all the way to 2006. In 2008, the company planned for an initial public offering but quickly moved to indefinitely delay those plans due to the global economic turmoil.

Yandex is among the largest high-tech companies in Russia, with an estimated workforce of about 2,500 employees. Currently, Yandex has branches all over Russia (Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Kazan), Ukraine (Kiev, Odessa, Simferopol) and in the United States (in Palo Alto, CA, to be exact).

Morgan Stanley is acting as sole global coordinator for the proposed offering. Deutsche Bank Securities and Goldman Sachs are acting as joint bookrunners.

The SEC filing follows in the footsteps of fellow Russian Internet giant Mail.ru’s successful listing – the company raised roughly $1 billion at the end of last year.

Also read:

Russian search giant Yandex partners with local Facebook-clone VKontakte
Russian search engine Yandex gets a semantic injection
Yandex acquires WebVisor’s behavior analysis technology, team
Yandex acquires Loginza, the single sign-in plugin maker

Yandex IPO to Make Dozens of Yandex Employees Millionaires (Quintura blog)

Yandex, Russia’s search engine leader and the nation’s largest Internet company, is reportedly considering a flotation that would raise around £1 billion or $1.56 billion for the firm, thisismoney reports, citing City sources. The company is said to be mulling a listing in London early next year, although it could still end up picking NASDAQ.

The IPO would follow in the footsteps of fellow Russian Internet giant Mail.ru’s successful listing – the company raised roughly $1 billion.

A Yandex spokesperson declined to confirm or deny the IPO plans, and said:

As a growing company, we continually evaluate various financing and strategic alternatives, but it is our policy not to comment on our plans in this regard.

Founded back in 1997, Yandex has been reported to be preparing an IPO before, with talks dating back all the way to 2006. In 2008, the company planned for an initial public offering but quickly moved to indefinitely delay those plans due to the global economic turmoil.

According to LiveInternet, Yandex’s market share in Russia reached 64,6 percent or about three times that of the number two, Google, in October 2010.

Earlier this year, comScore reported that it had ranked Yandex 7th in the Top 10 world search properties.

Aside from Russia, Yandex has operations in Belarus (yandex.by), Kazakhstan (yandex.kz) and Ukraine (yandex.ua).

In 2009, Yandex’s revenue reached 8.7 billion Rubles (roughly $278 million at current conversion rates). Contextual and display ads accounted for 86 percent and 11 percent of its revenues, respectively. The company doesn’t provide projections for this year, although it’s clear that contextual advertising in the Russian Internet market is growing quickly.

According to research from the Association of Communication Agencies of Russia, contextual ads grew 45% in January-September 2010 compared to the same period last year, reaching roughly 12 billion Rubles or $383 million.

Yandex is among the largest high-tech companies in Russia, with an estimated workforce of about 2,500 employees. Currently, Yandex has branches all over Russia (Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Kazan), Ukraine (Kiev, Odessa, Simferopol) and in the United States (in Palo Alto, CA, to be exact).

Yandex, operator of Russia’s largest search engine, has invested in Tel-Aviv based facial recognition technology startup Face.com, marking its first investment in an Israeli company. In total, Face.com has raised $4.3 million in Series B funding in a round led by previous investor Rhodium.

The news was first reported by TheMarker (in Hebrew) but we’ve confirmed the news with a Yandex representative, who declined to say how much it is investing in the startup.

Yandex did say they and Face.com are working on a “large joint project”, but failed to specify what that initiative entails exactly. Finally, Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh has joined the startup’s board of directors.

Face.com, founded in 2007, has developed a number of face recognition apps for Facebook (PhotoTagger and Photo Finder; the latter is currently in private alpha mode).

Last May, the company said its technology had helped users scan over 7 billion photos, and moved to launch a developer community and open API, providing third-party devs access to their core facial recognition technology.

One of the startup’s closest competitors, Polar Rose, was reportedly acquired by Apple for about $29 million.

Update: statement from Face.com founder and CEO Gil Hirsh:

Face.com has indeed accepted a round of funding. The total amount is $4.3M USD, and the participants included Rhodium, Yandex, and current private investors. We’re going to use the money to boost our development team, hire some new and talented people, and build out additional infrastructure to support our facial recognition platform.

We’ve had thousands of developers sign up to join our platform and get access to our facial recognition API’s, and we want to support those developers and provide great technology. We’re excited and very proud to have the support from our investors.

Russian search engine Yandex is now allowing users to limit search to only foreign websites (non Russian sites). Now users can click on the global search filter (as shown in this screenshot) to see results from foreign sources. The global search is also available at the company’s experimental Yandex.com portal launched for testing new search algorithms.

Yandex has been indexing foreign websites and adding global content to its search results for the past two years and caters towards Russian users, obviously. But the feature will allow a users to filter results more accurately if they want an answer from a website outside of Russia.

So, the search query TechCrunch on yandex.ru returns a long list of websites in Russian; but with the global search filter enabled, the results lead to English sites. Currently, Yandex indexes more than 4 billion pages in Latin languages, with the majority of these pages being in English. Yandex’s search results page now has the option to view either local or foreign search results separately. By default, Yandex search prioritizes local websites as before.

Yandex says that user queries in one of the Latin-alphabet based languages total 12-15% of all searches on the search engine. Yandex also plans to expand its search index to deliver multimedia results and other useful answers.

Yandex, which launched in 1997, has been able to outrun Google in Russia. Yandex has an estimated domestic market share of 63.6% according to LiveInternet.ru, with Google trailing at 21.8% in April.

This morning, Mail.ru confirmed (in Russian) that it will be replacing Yandex with Google as its default search provider starting January 2010.

The company noted that Mountain View will indeed refrain from branding the search engine with the Google name and logo like it usually does.

As we wrote earlier when word got out:

Mail.ru has an estimated 10% search share in Russia, behind Google with 23%, but both pale in comparison to leader Yandex, which takes up no less than 58% of the market. By replacing Yandex as default search engine on the Mail.ru portal, Google will grow its share to over one third of the market.

Google will also be powering the contextual advertising part of the equation for Mail.ru, in a country where its size is estimated at around $400 million.

Update: the agreement reportedly spans 1 year, and the terms stipulate that Mail.ru will receive a 60 percent share of revenues from ad clicks (which is more than Mail.ru currently receives from Yandex).

Mail.ru already worked with Google for search and ads from 2003 to 2005.

(Thanks for the tip, Yakov)