Yandex Buys Russian Auto Sales Site for $175M
Russian search giant Yandex plans to expand its automotive knowledge with today's acquisition of leading online auto classifieds business Auto.ru.
The $175 million deal is expected to close sometime in the third quarter of this year.
Auto.ru customers can browse more than 400,000 listings for new and used cars—the largest online library in Russia. The site also runs offers for tires, rims, and other spare parts, as well as editorial and user-generated content like reviews, news, and forums.
'Users come to Auto.ru to research what vehicles they should buy, read the latest auto news, search for tires and spare parts and buy and sell their vehicles,' Alexey Tretyakov, vice president of Yandex commerce, said in a statement. 'The acquisition of Auto.ru will enable Yandex to provide more comprehensive answers to users' questions and expand our capabilities in auto classifieds.'
As part of the deal, Yandex will work with the website to expand its functionality; users will still have access to Auto.ru going forward.
Auto.ru did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Yandex, which made a name for itself by specializing in recognizing the Cyrillic alphabet and Russian-language inflection in search queries, has been steadily building its business since 2000.
In 2013, the Moscow-based Web crawler surpassed Microsoft's Bing to become the fourth-largest search engine on the Internet—topped only by Google, Baidu, and Yahoo.
Yandex also joined forces with U.S.-based Facebook, inking a deal in January to allow public content from Facebook users in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, other CIS countries, and Turkey to be indexed and appear in search results.
The company later introduced a firmware kit for Android devices that lets overseas providers embrace the mobile OS—which includes search, mapping, and mail functions—without dealing with Google.
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