Versión original en inglés de la entrevista a Yandex de T2O media realizada durante dmexco 2014:
1. In which countries does Yandex have presence and what is your market share?
We are the largest search engine in Russia with about 65% market share. We also operate in some of the CIS countries, Ukraine, Belarus & Kazakhstan largest markets, we have also entered into Turkey about three years ago. Currently about 5% or 6% market share there. Growing nicely in that market also.
2. Can you highlight the most important data trends in these online markets? For example internet users, statistics, digital investments…
Currently the most important things that are happening in our market basically is strong online growth, so there has been a big transition from offline purchase behaviour to online. We are about 5 years behind where you would see the UK or US in terms of growth trends, so there has been an explosion in e-commerce, travel industries and a lot of renewed interest in large western companies coming to Russia the market is growing about 40% a year> compared to much smaller growth rates in Spain or eastern Europe.
3. You are ahead of Google in Russia, although Google is the worldwide leader. But Yandex is also very strong in the market. Which category sectors are growing more?
Our hottest sectors in terms of the advertising business… Travel is by far our hottest market and that´s a lot of people leaving Russia to explore the rest of the world, western Europe, some come to the US, Egypt is a big market for us.
We are also seeing high end luxury goods to fashion markets, watches, any sort of brand goods, mostly e-commerce, people like Ebay, Paypal, big western companies are coming and driving the ecommerce business.
4. What is the average profile of the online consumers and the evolution of their behavioural patterns whilst searching? Are Yandex users different from other search engines like Google or Yahoo?
Russian users are generally different than western users; we see a lot more search behaviour around transactions and purchase behaviour. So in Russia about 60% of people use a search engine before they buy something. In the US the number is more like 25% so they are using the search engines much more for purchasing online sales, than you see in the western world.
5. What are the main differences between online advertising options offered by Yandex and other big search engines? What should the potential advertiser know before launching the campaign in Yandex?
Our tools are very similar, the same sort of search and potential ad network that Google would have or Yahoo would have display advertising. The main difference for us is basically market share, we have 65% of the market, we reach about 90% of the online audience in Russia. In terms of how we work with people, especially in the west, we offer account management services which is different. We don’t expect our users, our advertising users, to understand Russian so we offer free translation optimization and all sorts of help for our western advertisers.
6.Why do you think that Spanish companies should be interested in investing in the Russian market? What type of results are companies that are already investing in the Russian market achieving?
We see a lot of interest in Spain, especially in the travel industry, and also in real estate. We see people searching for flights to Spain, hotels in Spain. We see people looking to invest in real estate market. Obviously there is a lot of wealthy individuals in Russia who are buying property all around the world and Spain happens to be one of the hottest markets.
7. What other projects aside from the search engine is Yandex working on? What is your long term expansion strategy over the coming years?
We are starting to expand beyond search, there is also geographical expansion like moving to Turkey. There are other countries that we think we can tackle also, and beyond search we are essentially moving into the big data market. It´s early days, at the end of the day, a search engine takes a lot of data and makes it more understandable.
We are applying that as an outside attack to analyse, there is a business around predicting earthquakes. We are also investing in a sail boat company which is trying to build the fastest sail boat to sail around the world.
These are very complex problems, that have lots of data and it’s hard to understand. We use the technology in our search engine to simplify and manage that data.
