MOSCOW: Yandex, Russia’s leading search engine, reports an 18-percent increase in year-over-year revenue gains for 2015, climbing to $820.4 million, or 59.8 billion RUB during the year.
The site owned an average of 57.3 percent of the Russian search market during the last quarter of 2015, with search queries up five percent over Q4 2014.
COO Alexander Shulgin says Yandex served a record number of advertisers in Q4 2015, with the site reporting advertiser totals at 394,000, up 23 percent compared to Q4 2014.
“In the face of economic headwinds and a highly competitive environment, we managed to stabilize our market share, improve product quality, significantly increase the size of our web index and introduce a sophisticated new auction model that is already having a material impact on monetization,” says CEO Arkady Volozh.
Yandex also reports it created three new business units during 2015: Yandex.Taxi, Auto.ru and Yandex.market. Shulgin says the company plans to invest aggressively in each of its new ventures during 2016.
In addition to its new business units, the search engine worked with Microsoft in 2015 to deliver Windows 10 with Yandex search in Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and a number of other countries.
