Russian Business Forum

The Russian web search company Yandex is to open a subsidiary -Yandex Laboratories - in the U.S.'s Silicon Valley, the company said in a press release on Friday.
It said Yandex Laboratories would be headed by Vish Makhijani, a former Yahoo executive.
Yandex, Russia's most popular Internet search resource, has reportedly been valued at $5 billion for an initial public offering at the U.S. Nasdaq trading floor in the fall. Yandex intends to float $1.5-2 billion worth of stock.
Yandex has mandated Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and Renaissance Capital to organize the share offering, the Russian Vedomosti business paper said last month.
According to the paper, Yandex is the world's second most popular non-English-language search vehicle after China's Baidu.
Russia's most popular Internet search resource, Yandex, has become one of the world's Top 10 search engines, according to a report by ComScore, a leading Internet market research company.
According to figures published by the company on Thursday for December 2007, Yandex ranked ninth, with 566 million searches, or 0.9 % of the world's search requests.
The planet's most popular search engine remained Google, which handled 41,345 billion searches, or 62.4 % of search requests, in the same period. Yahoo! ranked second with 12.8 %.
A total of 66.2 billion search queries were conducted worldwide in December 2007.
The director of the Yandex press service, Mikhail Yshakov, claimed that the company's share of the search market was actually higher, saying that, "According to our estimates, the number of search queries in December last year totaled 587 million."
Yandex announced profits of $72.6 million for 2006, a more than 50% increase, year-on-year.