Russia’s largest search engine Yandex (NASDAQ:YNDX) is planning to open an office in Shanghai to better tap the Chinese market, a company executive told TechNode.
Yandex is not going to compete head-on with local incumbent Baidu, but aims to find more cooperation opportunities with Chinese companies and help them to access the Russian market through Yandex and various in-house advertising platforms, the source added.
Yandex, Baidu and Naver Dominate Russian, Chinese and South Korean Search Market
As one of the largest European internet companies, the Netherlands-headquartered site operates Russia’s most popular search engine yandex.ru which takes 59.9% of Russia market share, according to data from Liveinternet.ru.
In addition to search, the company has a number of popular internet-related services and products that covers many aspects of daily life. Among them, Yandex.Maps is a mapping service, and others include Yandex.Market, an online retail comparison shopping service, taxi-hailing service Yandex.Taxi, Yandex.Search for Mobile, Yandex.Mail, and the online payment service Yandex.Money.
The site now has more than 6,000 employees and 16 offices around the world, boasting wide market coverage in former Soviet countries and Europe. Yandex had also begun attempts to penetrate the Middle East market from last year.
The company went public on the NASDAQ in May 2011, raising US$1.3 billion in the largest technology IPO worldwide that year.
The strengthening of Russian-Chinese cooperation has opened up opportunities for bilateral agreements. The turnover of export and import between China and Russia has been rapidly growing in recent years, reaching US$89.2 billion in 2013. The interest of Chinese business in Russian online customers is also growing from year to year. Russian social networking site VKontakte has also set eyes on the Chinese market and opened a marketing branch in Beijing last year.
Image credit: Yandex, Baidu
Editing by Mike Cormack (@bucketoftongues)
