> Yandex is a huge beneficiary from the war

This is not true. On the contrary, Yandex's business has suffered greatly. You can see it for yourself here https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/yndx

The company's employees are almost universally opposed to the war, but opinions about exactly how it should be stopped are, indeed, conflicted.

Let me clarify this: Yandex would clearly do better without the war but unlike many other companies it will come out ahead as it can pick up a lot of business through "import substitution".

Benefiting from something doesn't mean you won't suffer losses anyway. At this point which Russian company isn't performing negatively different since the day of the invasion?

How does it benefit from the war? I had the impression that they were caught in a pretty bad situation due to their outstanding debts and their suspension from nasdaq so that's very surprising!

They are basically "google of Russia" - main search engine, browser, etc. Waiting till Russia cuts off YouTube and the rest.

They basically adopt western open-source for Russian government (review and such). Their browser is Chromium, machine learning is Tensor Flow, etc. They also work in cybersecurity for Russian government (including conducting attacks).

> They also work in cybersecurity for Russian government (including conducting attacks)

Is there a source for that?

I don't know if it's much of a benefit, but as an outsider, I assume Yandex will essentially pick up the entirety of the Russian market for search, maps, and other tools if US services are blocked or frowned upon?

Advertising, for example, is a significant revenue stream for Yandex and the advertising market has lost a lot of businesses, so it's possible that the entire Russian ad market is now worth less than whatever the Yandex' share was back in February.

Search and maps was already theirs. However they got chance to expand in Yandex Phone space (replacing iPhones/Androids) and perhaps in desktop OS space (replacing Chromebooks and maybe Windows).

Probably cause all of the other cloud providers are limiting operations in Russia

I believe cloud revenue in Yandex structure is quite low and main business in search/ads

Search/ads and ride/delivery services. As you may know Yandex has very advanced SDC system which was used(SDC robots) by Grubhub in Arizona University. They have delivery services in London/Paris and taxi services in Insrael and couple European countries.

As for the Russia I found news(in Russian) that McDonalds was huge part of orders in delivery service. Ads system fully broken because of Google suspension. Without concurents average prices will rise exponentially. Small business will not be able to buy ads and will closed in near feature.

It is not about revenue. They are basically state corporation.

What. They are absolutely not a "huge beneficiary from the war".

The value of the company has plummeted and the only reason it isn't nearly worthless is because the stock can't be traded anymore.

Yandex is traded on the MOEX. It's priced around 1800 roubles/share, down from a pre-war high of around 6k and pre-COVID levels of around 3k.

Beaten down, but not "nearly worthless", and it is traded. (Not on the NASDAQ though.)

Oh I guess I didn't realize that Russia re-opened their stock exchange. Does anybody actually trade on it?

Also

> 1800 roubles/share

This is nearly worthless

Russians trade on it. Maybe they do have an overly rosy view of the company's fortunes, I dunno -- I don't know much about their business, how sensitive it is to the conflict and sanctions.

The stock price movement is easier to reason about, I guess. By that metric they've had a worse year than Salesforce, Netflix, Uber, Google. I'd agree that the conflict isn't good for them, but "worthless" is a bit strong for my palate.

The ban on selling shares by foreigners is probably still in place. So the price might be somewhat overestimated.