14 DAY TRIAL // Russian search engine giant Yandex has acquired Auto.ru, an online business for selling cars. After paying $175 million (€130 million) in cash for the company, Yandex will pump up its offering.
Firstly, the purchase will help Yandex increase its efforts in the automotive sector, where the company already has a portal where classified listings from a number of car ads sites are aggregated. The company will now be able to better collect revenues on the listings and display ads on the pages.
Furthermore, the search engine will surely find in handy all the car-related content that will become available for people even when they’re not trying to purchase a car.
Unlike many purchased companies, Auto.ru will continue to operate as part of Yandex, rather than shut down or be swallowed whole by the search engine. This should be a relief to fans of the site, especially since the portal has been around since 1996 and has some 400,000 listings for car sales.
“Auto.ru is the most popular automobile-related website in Russia and operates the largest and most detailed classifieds catalogue for new and used cars in Russia. 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. The acquisition of Auto.ru will enable Yandex to provide more comprehensive answers to users’ questions and expand our capabilities in auto classifieds,” said Alexey Tretyakov, vice president of Commerce at Yandex.
Just as Google, Yandex has slowly been working to expand its business beyond the original search engine and advertising gig that comes along with it. Over the years, it has purchased a local movies data base, mapping, mobile apps and mail tools.
The company is basically taking on a similar stance to the one adopted by its American counterpart. Having more products and owning more sites means that it has a wider number of places where it can run its ads, and therefore more revenue.
The fact that this time around Yandex has decided to focus on the automotive area makes sense for the Russian service considering that there is a high interest in the topic both in Moscow and in other areas of the country.
According to the announcement, Yandex has agreed to buy 100% of the issued shares of the parent company of the Auto.ru group for $175 million in cash. The transaction will likely be closed during the third quarter of 2014.