The Next Web

Mail.ru buys significant stake in Russian dating platform

Written on August 29, 2008 – 5:11 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Russia’s largest Internet portal Mail.ru has acquired a 30% stake in its online dating partner Mamba, Quintura reports. They had to pay $15 million for a chunk of the enormous dating service - which offers dating platforms to several big Russian Internet parties.

Mamba has an user base of 10 million people. 1.5 to 2 million of them are looking for the love of their life (or a one night stand) on a daily basis. Together with Loveplanet (which is a destination site), Mamba holds 90 percent of the Russian $21 million dating market.

Not surprisingly, Mamba’s financial numbers are also impressive. The company reported revenues of $9.2 million in the first half of 2008, which meant a 68% percent increase from the first half of 2007.

Mail.ru had to pay the 15 million dollars to Finam, a Moscow-based investment and financial services group that acquired a controlling stake in Mamba in October 2005. It’s their third hit this year, as they recently also sold their stakes in Begun (to Google) and computer game publisher Buka.

There’s interesting twist to this deal

The people at Rambler HQ - that other big Russian web portal - won’t be amused by Mail.ru’s move. Rambler’s dating section uses Mamba’s platform, and accounts for 25 percent of Mamba’s usage. How will they feel about a competitor buying a rather large stake in the same service provider?

If Rambler decides to move its dating section to another platform, the revenue of Mamba could decline by 25 percent. Then Mail.ru will temporarily become a victim of its own deal.

I hope you like that post!

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Finam, mail.ru, moscow, rambler, russia, yandex

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Russian search engine Yandex goes to Times Square, where $2 billion waits

Written on May 21, 2008 – 10:59 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

About a month ago we reported that the Russian search engines were on their way to enter the regions of world’s largest search engines, comfortably next to Google. The CEO of visual search engine Quintura Yakov Sadchikov keeps us up to date by emailing the latest on Europe’s third search market. Well, today is one special day for the Russian search engines: leading party Yandex is preparing for an IPO on Nasdaq this autumn and plans to raise $1.5 billion to $2 billion.

Yandex office: Dmitry Ivanov, head of development; John Boynton,
board member; Arkady Volozh, CEO

A few days ago, Yakov told us that studies from comScore learned Yandex was ranked third in Europe ahead of both Yahoo and Microsoft with 528 million or 2.2 percent of European searches in March 2008. In the same report, comScore said Eastern European search properties “will likely to gain traction and grow market shares”. So today, a news report about Yandex’ IPO from Reuters confirmed comScore’s prediction.

The expectations of raising up to $2 billion are based on a previous valuation of Yandex, which pinpointed the value of the engine on a staggering $5 billion. Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch reported that - when taking the ranking of Yandex in account - its revenues are not that large: “in 2007 it reported only $167 million in revenues, which was a 130 percent increase from 2006″. It’s probably the promising character of the Russian tech market that drives the high valuations.

Yandex’ march to Times Square is not the only IPO news from Russia today. The largest Russian free web mail provider and portal Mail.ru heads to London for an IPO that would value the company at $2 billion, reported business daily Kommersant today.

ipo, mail.ru, nasdaq, russia, search, yandex

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