Yandex Provides Update on Impact of Current Developments
ir.yandex
ir.yandex
They do payments and payment processing (think paypal and square and more combined)
They do cloud services (think a mix of GCP and AWS) for business.
They do personal storage (think dropbox/gdrive) and email, and more.
among more.
Edit: see I’m being downvoted, probably because “that would never happen” - I think it’s very realistic that they will either shut down the internet domestically or they’ll cut all non-domestic routing - they want/need information control, and the internet is porous. If dissent continues in Russia, they will do it.
Ref: https://www.reuters.com/technology/russia-disconnected-globa...
The Ruble has lost ~10% of it's value since then = ~$379M today.
So they've "only" lost $78M - not $250M.
- Son, why do you need 25 RUB for some ice cream? 30 RUB is a lot of money! Before you ask me for 35 RUB, think about how long I have to work for 40 RUB!
I don’t think people realize how hard these sanctions will hit over the next months. There is not going to be a modern Russia left.
True that there were lots of discussion for Chinese business getting suspended but was not the case for Russian till the start of this war (also their headquarter seems to be in the Netherlands)
Not sure to be honest, you might argue that their headquarter is in Netherlands but remain pretty known to anyone that they operate in Russia.
Not so easy to see. Their CEO must have a big headache these days
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/russia-yandex-governance-idU...
The Dutch part of Yandex may be bankrupted but the Russian part (with most of the assets) surely can continue.
Are my expectations of earnings for large global tech companies unrealistic, is this a currency valuation issue, or something else? This was very surprising to me.
Google search has about 2/3rds of what yandex has in Russia:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1094920/leading-search-e...
They'll most probably block it, too, I'll give it a day or two. It also depends how the negotiations with the Ukrainian side go over the weekend.
Most of that is natural resources sounds like they have a pretty small consumer economy for a country that huge.
Google says google's annual rev is 256.7b while US gdp is 20.94t.
So is this math correct? Yandex rev as % of gdp 5bb/1.48tt = .337%, google rev as % of gdp 256bb/20.94tt = .855%
I might have guessed even less given how much more tech companies make even between a US consumer and even somewhere like Europe. Fb is $48/15 in one quarter, I couldn't find one quickly for google
https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/FB...
In that regards Russia is not that bad: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PP...
But of course this affect the way you see at numbers on an absolute value
But I think on the other hand also still shows the relative value?
Like say for example - numbers not real. If the purchasing power needed to buy one shirt in RU is $10, and $30 in US, than the max amount of ad profit would be in line with those profit margins.
So FB can charge more for a buy my shirt ad in the US, because the ad buyer can spend more in real $ terms
But depends, if you use goods and services from foreign countries that affect also that aspect.
This is how is calculated btw:
https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/icp/brief/methodology-...
Was not that bad.
They have been outside of the global economy for decades during the cold war, they definitely know how to decouple. The problem is that this world is different than the previous one
Also what you say is not even true
> Elementary PPP calculation The PPP estimation process begins with the participating economies collecting prices for items chosen from a common list of precisely defined items. These common lists include both regional items, priced in a specific region, as well as global items, priced in all ICP regions. These two sets of prices cover the whole range of final goods and services included in GDP: household consumption expenditures, government consumption expenditures, and gross capital formation expenditures.
https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/icp/brief/methodology-...
Imagine if you were the search engine for Texas. It’d be a nice business, but not massive.
Note that people in Russia didn't switch from Google to Yandex: people in Russia switched from Yandex (and Rambler) to Google once Google has developed capabilities to search in Russian. Russian is flective language, so it's not trivial.
So the question is not really making 90% of people switch from Google but making 90% of people stay on Yandex. Inertia is a pretty big stumbling block.
There is also potential for local differentiation to be much stronger. Naver in South Korea manages to achieve this.
Take the rural / urban répartition of texas into account, rather than California's one ?
To put it bluntly, be ostensibly "more red" than google (even though you would end up giving most of the same result, because the state is way more purple than expected) ?
It seems very odd to me that (1) NASDAQ can halt trading on any stock for any reason and (2) Yandex has promised its bondholders large considerations – enough to bankrupt the company – should their stock be suspended for more than 5 consecutive days. Even if you disregard the current crisis, how does a provision like 2 make sense for any company, considering 1? Was it just overconfidence? Or negligence?
Because I can see lots of Russian entities still based in Russia
Russia is infamous for pressing businessmen to give up their assets. Evgeny Chichvarkin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky are quite interesting examples (check them out on wikipedia).
In Russia we say "the 1st rule of making business in Russia is to not host your business in Russia". Yandex and jetbrains are a good example of this rule! I really doubt that tax evasion was the primary goal of hosting Yandex's HQ in Netherlands
Source?
https://listingcenter.nasdaq.com/rulebook/nasdaq/rules/nasda...
Aside from that sometimes there are also political moves that might affect listing/delisting.
I wouldn't say that they've promised large considerations. They've promised to redeem the bonds. If you bought the bonds assuming you'd convert them into stock and see a big gain, getting 0.75% interest on your money is really disappointing. I think it's also important to remember that before the Ruble fell off a cliff, they had around $1.25B in cash on hand.
They only promised bondholders "if we get delisted and therefore these aren't convertible bonds anymore (since we aren't trading), we'll redeem them from you at face value plus the 0.75% interest."
I'd also note that this feels like a release for regulatory requirements. I don't think Yandex expects all its investors to redeem their bonds. They're stating the risks even if the probability isn't high. I'm sure they're required to.
> how does a provision like 2 make sense for any company
The bonds carry almost no interest (just 0.75%) so Yandex was trading the convertibility of it into stock as a key selling point. If it isn't trading, then that convertibility isn't really something an investor can bank on.
You can see that other companies have some similar things around delisting events: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001822829/000119312..., http://www.hcsurgicalspecialists.com/images/PDF/29072019-HCS...
I'd also note that the terms sheet from Yandex seems a bit more generous than their press release indicates. It's not just being beholden to the NASDAQ since they do seem to offer up the NYSE as an alternative remedy. It also seems like there's the possibility for the shares to be "admitted to trading and/or listing on another internationally recognised, regularly operating and regulated stock exchange," but given that they are trading on other exchanges that doesn't seem to cover it (it's really hard to parse the language around it, try reading the "delisting event" criteria https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1513845/000110465920...).
Frankly, some things are hard to prepare for - and preparing for the worst can put you in a bad position in the 99% of cases that aren't the worst. Should they have issued a bond at 8% interest rather than the convertible bonds at 0.75% interest? In the 99% of cases where Russia doesn't cause the world to go against it, that's potentially a huge waste of money that lets competitors get an opening against you. The NASDAQ isn't just suspending trading on companies on a whim. They have a compelling business interest to seem reliable to companies. The NYSE and NASDAQ are both reviewing new US sanctions to see how they'd fit in (https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/russia-ukraine-latest-news-...).
It's actually kinda shocking that the world is caring about this invasion. Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and no one really cared. Russia invaded Ukraine (Crimea) in 2014 and no one really cared. Russia had already started things rolling in Eastern Ukraine (Donetsk) a year ago and no one really cared. It's probably coming as a huge shock to a lot of Russian companies that the West is caring this time. It's probably coming as a shock to Putin. Russia invaded and annexed part of Ukraine 8 years ago and while we might have thought it was bad, we didn't really do much about it.
Delistings aren't common and it seems like the wrong thing to hedge against (without the benefit of hindsight). In normal times, if Yandex were delisted and investors wanted to be redeemed, they'd just sell some bonds at 8% interest and redeem the 0.75% interest bonds. They might not want to sell bonds at that interest, but they could. In normal times, the Ruble would be worth more and they'd have the money to cover the bonds. In normal times, they wouldn't be worried about whether they could exfiltrate cash from Russia. It's just a crazy time to be a company like Yandex where you're not going to be able to raise money (pretty much) regardless of the interest rate you offer.
Even in this situation and even if most investors want to redeem, Yandex isn't with no options. Yandex could always offer to exchange the notes for other notes. "Your notes that you can force me to redeem were convertible at $45/share? I'll give you notes convertible at $35/share to stick it out." Sure, it's painful to water down investors, but less painful than ending the company. Sure, some investors will still want to cash out, but you can sweeten the pot to keep enough holding.
All sorts of improbable things can happen to companies. Apple could remove Facebook from the iPhone. Apple's anti-tracking moves have seen Facebook's shares dip 38%. China could invade Taiwan and Apple could be left without processors for a decent amount of time. China could ban the iPhone or prevent iPhone manufacture in China. Facebook and Apple have a much better ability to hedge than someone like Yandex.
I don't think it was over-confidence or negligence. I think this is a really improbable thing to happen to them. They wanted a 0.75% interest bond offering and if something went wrong, they could just borrow at 5-10% to pay back redemptions. That's a better plan than just borrowing at 5-10% in the first place. It's not like Russian companies were targeted like this for other Russian invasions. All of a sudden, companies are suspending service to Russia - even consumer goods and services. Like, Netflix is suspending service in Russia - as if random Russians getting entertained by Netflix is helping their war effort. And I'm not saying Netflix shouldn't suspend service there, but it shows how far things have shifted in a matter of weeks. Russia had already invaded and annexed Crimea and had already supported rebels in eastern Ukraine and basically broken it off from the rest of Ukraine.
I just think it's hard to imagine this becoming a company-threatening event in normal circumstances and I think Russia really wasn't prepared for how much the West would hate their new invasion of Ukraine. In normal circumstances, they have the cash available and/or they just raise some other money to pay the bondholders and it's not a big deal.
That's not true. International payments with cards issued by non-sanctioned banks continue to work.
The point is: the biggest reason for Netflix and co. is being unable to get paid through the channels people are using. The fact that you can if you're savvy was never the sort of hoops companies want to require their customers to jump through.
Please don't speak on the accuracy of comments when clearly you have no idea yourself.
*ring ring*
Margin Calling
Seems pretty fast.
> In the event that such redemption right was triggered, we would be required to issue a notice within five calendar days informing the holders of the Notes of their redemption rights.
Given: > The Yandex group as a whole does not currently have sufficient resources to redeem the Notes in full
Yandex seems destined to bankruptcy and/or just walking away from the west.
Uncertain who the $1.25b are owed to.
> In the event that we were prevented from distributing additional funds from our Russian subsidiaries to our Dutch parent company, Yandex would not have sufficient resources to redeem a majority of the Notes
Better take the 50% haircut than the long game that gets you nothing.
There's a risk foreign currency held by Yandex might be sold to RUB per a Russian government order. I'd rather have shareholders cash out than have these assets fall into the hands of sanctioned entities.
theyre probably trading at a substantial discount!
I got a kick out of the mention of “consumer sentiment”
Talk about easy money and a massively distorted interest rates.
*looses $1,000,000,000
edit: one extra zero
Apart from Clickhouse, i feel like Yandex Maps are also slightly more readable than Google maps and other alternatives and the overall UI of their sites (and for example their e-mail) feels a bit more snappy and easy than that of Google's products. I'd even compare them to Google as a regional equivalent for the Russian speaking populace.
Example of their maps of my country's capital, notice the double translations when zoomed out, such a neat idea, as well as the readable color scheme: https://yandex.ru/maps/11474/riga
Of course, they also have a native language equivalent: https://yandex.lv/maps/11474/riga
(not sure about the cultural implications of non-native names for places, but at the same time it's nice that people who struggle with certain names are helped out like that, for example, if i went to China/Japan/Taiwan/Korea i'd be delighted to have romanized or even machine translated names for places)
Compare to Google Maps, especially the color and readability when zoomed out: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Riga
And here's OpenStreetMap: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=riga
Of course, at the same time, personally i also enjoy the OSM project, host my own e-mail (forgoing both Google and Yandex, as well as other alternatives for example, for communicating with the government or other important things, having semi-throwaway e-mails with multiple providers for other purposes) and also realize some of the reasoning behind the sanctions.
Here's hoping that good developers will be able to work on interesting problems and make the world a better place in whatever capacity they can in the future!
https://yandex.ru/maps/90/san-francisco/?ll=-122.431516%2C37...
Obviously, if you don't speak the language or don't want said translations, you can also use the english version of the maps, for example: https://yandex.com/maps/90/san-francisco/?ll=-122.431516%2C3...
In the non-Russian variety of the maps there is also a little dropdown in the lower right which seems to let you switch between the variations - it not being there in the Russian maps feels like a UX shortcoming though.
Also, i think that they could have borrowed the double naming for streets as well, instead of just cities, but i guess they didn't manage to find a good way to display data like that.
Zoomed out example of both names visible: https://yandex.ru/maps/90/san-francisco/?ll=-122.391120%2C37...
All the way at the end, but there are other sources (Russian):
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/28/business/russia-sanctions...
Source: I own a Russian company.
Yandex is not a neighborhood cornershop company.
Obviously there are worse things to worry about, but it's an unintended consequences of the situation.
I don't imagine Russia would accept losing such a big part of their planned Russian firewall and be stuck with only Google/Bing as search engines.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...
If you're willing to condemn them and their families to 15 years of prison for "honour", it's the least you could do.
My point is that it's extremely easy to condemn people online, but 99% of Westerners have never even had a contrarian position, let alone a contrarian position against an authoritarian government.
Canadians had a hint of it during the Trucker Protest if they donated and had their banking cancelled, but that's been about as close as the West has been to this sort of regime.
I think this is the meat of it. Plenty of westerners have some level of contrarian positions, but we don't face real resistance for it and thus fall into the trap of thinking it's easy for everyone else.
Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, it's drastic and heavily coercive, and it's arguably collateral damage. But it's not like these Russian programmers are having their apartments shelled. This is war through other means, and war is hell.
Yandex picked the sides long ago, and now they are paying for being on the wrong side of the history. They aren't just complicit in censorship somehow, they are the censors themselves.
There are no 'good guys' in this war.
- Putin is a brutal dictator.
- America is pushing an amazing amount of propaganda in this war while simultaneously sending arms and funds to back a Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen targeting civilians.
- Ukraine has enlisted openly white supremacist neo-nazi's in their national guard to fight Russia in the east.
- Facebook even unbanned the Ukranian Azov Brigade [0] this week as long as they are fighting the Russians [1]
This is a war with no heroes and no winners, even though we have been taught to hate the 'others' to the point of targeting everyday Russian citizens, even those who oppose Putin's actions.
The truth is the first casualty in times of war. Propaganda works on all of us. The best thing we can do is realize that fact.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Battalion
[1] https://theintercept.com/2022/02/24/ukraine-facebook-azov-ba...
pretty sure i seen some heroes.
That said, my question was about how certain you were that at least some of the heroic acts you read or watched, were not some form of propaganda? Call me cynical but as soon as the conflict started I started investigating claims from both sides and I learned that a significant amount of what we heard early in this invasion turned out to be false propaganda.
Examples:
- Figher Ghost Ace turns out to be a myth https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/03/02/ukraines-figh...
- Israel TV Channel shows Star Wars Tie Fighter crash landed in Ukraine https://www.nytimespost.com/israeli-tv-channel-runs-live-foo...
- According to Reuters/MSNBC/US Officials - There is no evidence Russia attacked nuclear reactors in Ukraine. https://www.reuters.com/article/ukraine-crisis-usa-nuclear-e...
There's tons of evidence to show the horrors of what Russia is doing in Ukraine, and stuff like the ghost of Kyiv is just a morale boost for Ukrainians and is utterly irrelevant.
So yes, you should of course be sceptical, but no amount of honest and fair scepticism will paint Russia's invasion in a significantly better light.
TL;DR: The war didn't start last week. It has been ongoing since 2014 and involves horrible acts from both sides.
No, they don't average out and unfortunately we may never know what the 'truth' is here.
I won't pretend to have all the answers, but I will say after watching the video, the situation appears to be much more complicated than it is being depicted on western media.
Curiosity Stream: Why Russia is invading Ukraine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If61baWF4GE
Not that I can find. They seem to be focused on military strategy and geopolitics. Their other videos are about the reasons behind other modern military conflicts.
[Citation needed]
Also, it seems we both agree that invading another country and shelling civilians is also wrong, whether it is Russia or the US or others waging wars of aggression.
But nazis exist in many countries, and are given legitimacy in many countries. In Ukraine they're paramilitary, in Russia they're a mercenary force, in Germany they sit in parliament (AFD), in US they have obvious affiliation with the political party that is in power half the time (and have strong legal protections for both their speech and guns).
All of that can be used as excuses to forcefully "denazify" a country, like Russia is doing now, but none of that are actually good reasons to invade those countries or deny any of those countries the right for independence, not even close.
It's conceivable that in some situations, it seems likely to result in the less-evil outcome.
Case in point, suppose you had a neo-nazi unit offering to take out a Russian artillery battery that was shelling civilians. Do you refuse to truck them to that vicinity because you find them repugnant?
Life is full of hard choices; doubly so in war.
I am firmly of the position that no Nazi is a good Nazi. I am surprised to find myself in the minority here but based on the downvotes it is clear that my position is not a popular one.
Not really. The example I chose was already hypothetical, and not necessarily apropos to the current situation in Ukraine. The additional context you provided doesn't change my basic point that there's a calculation to be made.
> I am firmly of the position that no Nazi is a good Nazi.
I think we may be discussing two different things. I wasn't talking about the moral standing of individual Nazis. I was talking about the moral calculation of temporarily collaborating with them to possibly achieve a better outcome than not collaborating with them.
Extending the earlier example, suppose there's just one neo-nazi, who's offering to go on a suicide mission that will take out 1000 Russian artillery batteries, saving 500,000 Ukranians. And nobody but you would know, so the neo-nazi's actions couldn't even potentially inspire others.
Would you entertain the possibility that that is a good trade-off? If yes, then you might be agreeing that there's a calculation to be performed. If no, then I'd wonder why you'd find it preferable to let 500,000 Ukranians die. (I'm not calling you a moral monster. I'm just trying to lay things out that shows there's an actual dilemma.)
Yes, I would would most certainly agree to support such an individual in the implausible scenario you just described.
However under those circumstances I would argue that the soldier is no longer a Nazi, but in fact he is now a Nazi defector - so not the same thing.
I am very glad to see how difficult it still is for folks on HN to support Nazis, even when they fight for Ukraine against the Russians.
I don’t support Nazis - never have - not even Ukrainian Nazis. I think it is hypocritical to do so and from your comment neither do you I believe.
It's not even worth mentioning.
Ps. Wagner group is > 6000.
Ps2. Every country has some dumbass neonazi's somewhere.
How many other countries (that the West defends) can claim to have openly employed neo-Nazis officially by the Government for as long as Ukraine?
I am old enough to remember when an entire Canadian trucker convoy protest movement was smeared as Nazis because 1 protester held 1 nazi flag on the 1st day of a 24 day protest before being asked to leave by other protesters.
Checks notes - That was only a couple weeks ago.
Now it seems that so many are willing to look the other way or even apologize for employing literal Nazis with guns simply because these Nazis are fighting for the ‘right’ side.
For the record, it is OK to support Ukraine’s right to defend itself, while also denouncing the decision to employ Nazis.
A few weeks ago, I would have expected nothing less from HN. Suddenly it seems the rules have changed?
Shaking my head, I don’t understand.
If you are a male in Ukraine, you are essentially enlisted at this point. Heck, prisoners are being released to fight.
While they continue to fight for the sovereignty of a nation headed by a Jewish president I can see how they could be useful. Soldiers often aren't nice people. Most countries have at least a few hundred of these types of neo-Nazis.
Please share examples if you have them. It should be easy if, as you say “most countries have at least a few hundred.”
I’m struggling to understand how I am the minority here calling out what I always thought was a widely agreed principle on HN i.e. Nazis = bad.
Nazis are not the good guys and fighting alongside Nazis, even if convenient, is wrong. A few weeks ago this statement would have been so obvious as to be redundant on HN.
What if we win the war but lose our moral compass?
How do you explain to your kids that Nazis are bad except sometimes they are useful so not always bad?
That law that you mention requires only to publish news from officially registered media. At that moment there were officially registered not-pro-Putin media that could be used as a source (for example, covering anti-government protests, trial on Navalny and so on), but Yandex preferred to tune the algorithm so that it chooses news from pro-Putin media for the homepage that is seen by millions of people.
Yandex chose to become a propaganda outlet. Some of the news that they re-publish from propaganda media are very low quality and, I think, even violate Yandex's own rules. If you understand Russian, read this headline for example: [1]. For those, who don't understand Russian, the headline contains the word "shit" while describing (with rejoice) how Lyubov Sobol was denied to take part in Moscow State Duma elections. There was no law requiring Yandex to accept such publications for their news aggregator, but they accepted it.
[1] https://newssearch.yandex.ru/news/search?text=%D0%B1%D0%BB%D...
Rukipedia even has a section on incidents suggesting both manual fiddling with the YN output and the government's stuffing of it: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Яндекс.Новости#Критика
As for the example you cite: if it was found just in the ‘news search’, then it's possibly not from a source ‘certified’ for appearing in the main news feed—from what I've read, it seems that the search includes many more sources than the feed, and is possibly not regulated by that law.
[1] https://yandex.ru/news/smi?name=%D0%9C%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%...
Well, if I understand its powers right then now the government can use it to transfer the whole company to its buddies.
I use yandex when I don't want censored results - google when I want to know something like "location of X in videogame Y"
Google cannot censor. By definition. Neither can Yandex. Both can be censored however, although only the latter is.
The Russian government can & does censor, including, starting tomorrow, 15-year jail-sentences for „misleading statements“ about you-know-what.
https://www.google.com/search?q=censor%20definition
> examine (a book, movie, etc.) officially and suppress unacceptable parts of it.
https://www.google.com/search?q=officially
> with the authority of the government or other organization
I would call it censorship. But in those examples you listed, I would attribute it to the government and not the company. Because by removing those elements, they are not "exercising their rights to do so", they are "complying with local laws and regulations by doing so".
For a specific example: in Russia, "propaganda of homosexualty" (which includes something as trivial as explicitly acknowledging that one of the main characters is attracted to a person, or people in general, of the same sex) is against the law and is heavily punished.
So in reality, those companies only have two options: sell their product with those elements removed for that specific market or become unable to legally sell their product in that market at all.
Is it censorship? I would argue "yes", but I wouldn't say that the censorship is done by the company. If that action was required in order to be in compliance with local laws and regulations, I would call it for what it actually is - government censorship. After all, they are the ones making those laws and regulations that decide what is allowed and what needs to be removed.
It is true that it is impossible for Google to violate the 1st Amendment (unless they were nationalized first).
They're a private company. They can do whatever they want within the limits of the law. And the law doesn't say anything about not publishing something. Which can be done for purposes of censorship.
They're not a publisher. You have zero ability to post anything to Google, so there is nobody to be censored. They're an aggregator, and any aggregator can display whatever information they want.
does yandex show you putin's mansion?
But I've cut a lot of the tracking crap out for you:
https://yandex.com/maps/org/rezidentsiya_na_myse_idokopas/84...
I assume you don't know there's a war in Ukraine happening right now then. Just take a look at the front page of https://yandex.com/news. It's like a different reality.
Google for things censored in Russia.
Calling censorship take downs due to copyright infringement and alikes seems like a stretch.
There's a difference between things taken down due to the political agenda of the government (Russia), and things taken down because they violate someone else's rights (West).
Who's right's were violated?
Political agenda's censor both.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ukraine-war-...
Regardless: Arkady issues a press release saying, "This war is fucking Yandex up, we have no idea what's going to happen, earning in ₽ but investments in $ ain't great, and this surely isn't going to increase uptake of Yandex products abroad."
What precisely is that going to do besides land his ass in YaG-14/10?
1. Do not establish any contracts with government.
2. Do not participate in any governmental organizations or organizations created with any support from the government as a member.
3. Do not have any assets in Russia, that can not be instantly moved out.
4. Do not have any business with any person who might be business partners, friends, clients, family of anyone controlling or participating or in any way related to Russian government. Especially the military or the internal security.
5. Do not have any business with any legal entity involving anyone from number 4. If you have to, always demand full prepayment and mind number 3.
6. Do not incorporate any businesses in Russia, whose activity might contradict goals of persons from number 4 or entities from number 5.
7. Do not create any high earning businesses in Russia. Exceptions are businesses based on intellectual property (that can be sheltered outside), or on personal skills/knowledge (that can't be taken away).
8. Never rely that the courts will take your side even in clear cut cases. Also never rely on any number of qualified lawyers telling you what you are doing is legal in Russia. No matter what the law says, the court can at any time decide otherwise.
9. Never let your business do anything unusual, if it is offered by any entity from numbers 4 and 5, even if (and especially when) certain preferential treatment is offered.
10. Never end up in situation where an immediate and irreversible need to leave Russia is impossible, or complicated, or would have high cost, or would threaten other people. Even if you are precisely following the rules 1-9.
Yandex violates quite a few.
Certainly after the theft of vk from Durov everyone knew what the deal is.
1. Keep your servers abroad
2. Register your domains abroad
3. Incorporate abroad
4. Keep your assets abroad. In multiple places (in case one bans Russian transactions)
5. In multiple places! (other governments also suck quite often)
6. Keep your databases abroad
7. Keep logs of all actions and security tight (abroad)
8. Put assets and risks into many separate entities
9. Just skip 1-8 and give everything to Russian government upon incorporation - less headache
10. Move abroad
From 2010 http://blog.micromarketing.ru/advice/9-point-5-rules-fot-it-...
Now I’d wish they’d choose to go down in glory and spread the truth in every way they can, as long as they can. Because in four weeks they are gone no matter what. So far, it doesn’t look like it.
But this press release is just „not being stupid“.
You haven't done your homework.
Just because they have to toe the line of a goverment where they operate, should they stop serving the hundreds of millions of Russian people.
Isn't Twitter toeing the line of EU while censoring RT? Not that RT was publishing truth anyway but my point is companies toe the line on the basis of where they operate.
You don't expect Baidu to put the image of Tank man on their home page.
Should Apple employees have quit when the iPhones they designed were being manufactured by labour working in inhumane conditions? At least that was something that Apple could have easily controlled instead of trying to maximize the margins on their products.
Yes, yes, they absolutely should have done this. They are in the best position to force a change.
In fairness, they weren’t supporting a warring regime a month ago. I won’t say I would have worked at Yandex then but it wouldn’t have been the reflexive “no” that it is now.
Whether this excuses anything is not my point.
The person doing the telling… HAS TO MENTION THE WAR. The absurdity boggles the mind.
Not it's simple or I always do the right thing, but there is a right thing to do.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/media/2022/03/04/russia-media-ukr...
If it were possible to target sanctions directly at the war's cheerleaders, that would be great. It's not, and so sanctions harm Russians in the aggregate in the hopes of bringing down support in the aggregate.
What is unbelievable is the level of ignorance, hypocrisy and general lack of awareness in people who have free access to information.
Also wrong to assume they are on Putins side.
Russia != Putin