Yandex co-founder Arkady Volozh is leaving the company, his farewell letter on December 30 was published on the corporate portal, reports Chiang (the organization was included in the list of foreign agents by the Ministry of Justice).
“As you know, I do not manage Russian Yandex for a long time, and this year I had to completely leave all positions in the company. Now the board of directors and management are developing a plan for the restructuring of the company – in the current circumstances, in my opinion, this is quite reasonable and necessary, ”the text of the message quotes the publication.
In the letter, Volozh complains that “in the hustle and bustle of recent months” he never said goodbye to his employees.
“New Year is a good opportunity to fix that. I wanted to tell you a lot, but for now I will limit myself to a few words,” he wrote, emphasizing that Yandex will forever remain “the project of his life”.
The businessman also stated that the company is still interested in helping develop its four international start-ups. He ended his speech with the words “May the new year bring peace to all”.
It became clear in the summer that Volozh will leave Yandex. In June, the European Union put Volozh on the sanctions list, after which he resigned from the board of directors and CEO of the group of companies and its international subsidiaries.
new build
HORSE Help The Yandex website states that as of December 30, 2022, 45.1% of the voting shares and 8.5% of the common shares are still owned by the Volozh family fund. 46.3% of the voting shares and 87.6% of the capital are open to the public. The remaining 6.6% voting rights and 3.2% ordinary shares are controlled by the employees.
On November 25, it was learned that Yandex will share assets and transfer international portions of services to independent companies managed in the Netherlands. Other services will continue to operate in Russia.
“The possibility of changing the corporate structure, where the management of the selected group of companies will be transferred to Yandex management, is also being considered,” the company said.
On December 5, Alexei Kudrin, head of the Accounts Chamber, accepted Yandex’s offer to become a corporate development consultant. Shortly before that, on November 30, the Federation Council dismissed him ahead of schedule.
“In total, I worked in the public sector for about 25 years. Now I want to focus on big projects that are broadly related to the development of private initiatives but also have a significant impact on people,” Kudrin explained his transition.
How was Yandex created?
Volozh graduated from the Oil and Gas Institute. IM Gubkin graduated in applied mathematics in 1986.
In 1989 he founded Comptek, an equipment distribution company. In 1993, a program was created here to search the hard disk of the computer, called “Yandex” (Another inDEXer – “another indexer, anyway”). The Yandex.Ru search engine was officially announced at the Softool fair in 1997.
In February 2020, Russian Forbes named Yandex the most valuable Runet company and estimated its value at $14.6 billion.