Yandex, the largest web search engine over in Russia, has recently agreed to fork out a cool $175 million to purchase car information and advertising site Auto.ru. In this particular move, it is widely speculated that Yandex intends to make some headway in the classifieds business. The full acquisition of Auto.ru will happen some time in the third quarter of the year, and here is a little bit of background information on what Auto.ru offers – it happens to boast of 400,000 classifieds thereabouts, catering to both new as well as used cars, not to mention auto parts to boot.
For comparison’s sake, Yandex has double the market share of Google Inc. over in Russia, and this certainly gives them the brand presence and leverage to snap up other companies, including expanding their scope beyond that of Internet search. In fact, Yandex did pick up Multiship, an online-delivery aggregator in January this year, while in October last year, they forked out $80 million for KinoPoisk, the Russian equivalent of the IMDb movie database.
In addition, Auto.ru happens to be the leading vehicle classifieds website in Moscow, and has taken its place among the top three over in Russia, so it would be extremely interesting to see just how this particular will develop in the long run.
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