By Amir Mizroch
BARCELONA--Russia's most popular search engine Yandex NV (YNDX)
said Wednesday that the crisis in eastern Ukraine has had a big
impact on its business.
Speaking at Morgan Stanley's European Technology, Media and
Telecoms conference here, Yandex Chief Financial Officer Greg
Abovsky said the company was losing a lot of search queries from
Ukraine.
"Ukraine is a pretty big chunk of our business in terms of
clicks," Mr. Abovsky said. "It's very small in terms of
revenue--some 2%--but in terms of clicks it's pretty substantial.
Losing a ton of clicks in that part of the country has been
certainly detrimental to the business."
The core Russian business of paid clicks and search continue to
grow at a healthy pace, he added.
Mr. Abovsky said Yandex is losing market share in Turkey, which
was a test bed of international expansion for the Russian
company.
Yandex Chief Operating Officer Alexander Shlugin said the
company had decided to "stand back a bit" on investments in
advertising in Turkey compared to previous years and focus
primarily on product quality. "But we will stay in this market," he
added.
Mr. Abovsky said Yandex was having difficulty growing its
business on Android mobile devices, and its market share on phones
running Google Inc.'s (GOOG) mobile platform was falling.
"The problem on Android is that Google owns the platform. You
can't show up as much as you maybe want to," he said.
To counter the difficulty, he said, Yandex is experimenting with
the way its ads are seen on the Internet and on mobile platforms,
as well as increasing the amount of ads shown on mobile phones, up
to two or three per commercial query from only one, as is currently
the case.
Write to Amir Mizroch at amir.mizroch@wsj.com
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