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YANDEX N.V. INDEX TO CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS

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UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

WASHINGTON, D.C. 20549

FORM 20-F

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Commission file number: 001-35173

YANDEX N.V.

(Exact name of Registrant as specified in its charter)

N/A

(Translation of Registrant’s name in English)

The Netherlands

(Jurisdiction of incorporation or organization)

Schiphol Boulevard 165

Schiphol P7 1118 BG, The Netherlands

(Address of principal executive offices)

Arkady Volozh, Chief Executive Officer

Schiphol Boulevard 165

Schiphol 1118 BG, The Netherlands

Telephone: +31 20-206-6970

Facsimile: +31 20-446-6372

Email: askIR@yandex-team.ru

(Name, Telephone, E-mail and/or Facsimile number and Address of Company Contact Person)

Securities registered or to be registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act.

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Securities registered or to be registered pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act. None

Securities for which there is a reporting obligation pursuant to Section 15(d) of the Act. Class A Ordinary Shares

Indicate the number of outstanding shares of each of the issuer’s classes of capital or common stock as of the close of the period covered by the Annual Report.(1)

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act. Yes ☒  No ◻

If this report is an annual or transition report, indicate by check mark if the registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Yes ◻ No ⌧

Note—checking the box above will not relieve any registrant required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 from their obligations under those Sections.

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days. Yes ⌧ No ◻

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has submitted electronically every Interactive Data File required to be submitted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to submit such files). Yes ⌧ No ◻

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, or an emerging growth company. See the definitions of “large accelerated filer,” “accelerated filer,” and “emerging growth company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.

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If an emerging growth company that prepares its financial statements in accordance with U.S. GAAP, indicate by check mark if the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards† provided pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Exchange Act. ◻

Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant has filed a report on and attestation to its management’s assessment of the effectiveness of its internal control over financial reporting under Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (15 U.S.C. 7262(b)) by the registered public accounting firm that prepared or issued its audit report. ☒

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† The term “new or revised financial accounting standard” refers to any update issued by the Financial Accounting Standards Board to its Accounting Standards Codification after April 5, 2012.

Indicate by check mark which basis of accounting the registrant has used to prepared the financial statements included in this filing:

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If “Other” has been checked in response to the previous question, indicate by check mark which financial statement item the registrant has elected to follow. Item 17 ◻ Item 18 ◻

If this is an annual report, indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act). Yes ☐ No ⌧

⁽¹⁾ In addition, we had 1,928,621 Class A shares held in treasury and nil Class C shares issued and fully paid as of December 31, 2020. Our Class C shares are issued from time to time solely for technical purposes, to facilitate the conversion of our Class B shares into Class A shares. They are held by a Conversion Foundation managed by members of our Board of Directors. For the limited period of time during which any Class C shares are outstanding, they will be voted in the same proportion as votes cast by holders of our Class A and Class B shares, so as not to influence the outcome of any vote.

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In this Annual Report on Form 20-F (this “Annual Report”), references to “Yandex,” the “company,” “we,” “us,” or similar terms are to Yandex N.V. and, as the context requires, its consolidated subsidiaries.

Our consolidated financial statements are prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP and are expressed in Russian rubles. In this Annual Report, references to “rubles” or “RUB” are to Russian rubles, and references to “U.S. dollars” or “$” are to United States dollars.

Our fiscal year ends on December 31 of each year. References to any specific fiscal year refer to the year ended December 31 of the calendar year specified.

This Annual Report includes market data reported by Yandex.Radar (February 2021), the Association of Russian Communication Agencies (AKAR) (March 2021), the Russian Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) (February 2021) and the Bank of Russia (January 2021).

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Forward-Looking Statements

This Annual Report contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Words such as “project,” “believe,” “anticipate,” “plan,” “expect,” “estimate,” “intend,” “should,” “would,” “could,” “will,” “may” or other words that convey judgments about future events or outcomes indicate such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements in this Annual Report may include statements about:

The forward-looking statements included in this Annual Report are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Our actual results of operations may differ materially from those stated in or implied by such forward-looking statements as a result of a variety of factors, including those described under Part I, Item 3.D. “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in this Annual Report.

We operate in an evolving environment. New risks emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for our management to predict all risks, nor can we assess the effect of all factors on our business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statements. You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. We undertake no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

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Ruble amounts have been translated into U.S. dollars at a rate of RUB 73.8757 to $1.00, the official exchange rate quoted as of December 31, 2020 by the Central Bank of the Russian Federation. Such U.S. dollar amounts are not necessarily indicative of the amounts of U.S. dollars that could actually have been purchased upon exchange of Russian rubles at the dates indicated, and have been provided solely for the convenience of the reader. See “Risk Factors–The principal markets in which we operate are generally subject to greater financial, economic, legal and political risks than more developed markets. Such risks may have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.”

The following selected consolidated financial data should be read in conjunction with our “Operating and Financial Review and Prospects” and our consolidated financial statements and the related notes appearing elsewhere in this Annual Report. Our consolidated financial statements are prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. These historical financial results are not necessarily indicative of the results to be expected in any future period.

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* Not restated to reflect adoption of ASC 842 Leases, which requires the recognition of right-of-use assets and lease liabilities for operating leases.

Exchange Rate Information

Our business is primarily conducted in Russia and the majority of our revenues are denominated in Russian rubles. We have presented our most recent annual results of operations in U.S. dollars for the convenience of the reader. Unless otherwise noted, all conversions from RUB to U.S. dollars and from U.S. dollars to RUB in this Annual Report were made at a rate of RUB 73.8757 to $1.00, the official exchange rate quoted by the Central Bank of the Russian Federation as of December 31, 2020.

See “Risk Factors–The principal markets in which we operate are generally subject to greater financial, economic, legal and political risks than more developed markets. Such risks may have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.” for a discussion of the foreign currency exchange rate risks and uncertainties our business faces.

B. Risk Factors

Investing in our Class A shares involves a high degree of risk. The risks and uncertainties described below and elsewhere in this Annual Report, including in the section headed “Operating and Financial Review and Prospects”, could materially adversely affect our business. These are not the only risks that we face; additional risks and uncertainties of which we are unaware, or that we currently deem immaterial, may also become important factors that affect us. Any of these risks could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. In such case, the trading price of our Class A shares could decline. Please read a summary of the risk factors, followed by a detailed overview.

Summary of Risk Factors

The following is a summary of what we believe to be the material risks and uncertainties that could materially adversely affect our financial condition, results of operations, cash flows, and competitive position.

Risks Related to the Current Global Political, Regulatory and Economic Environment

Risks Related to Our Governance Structure

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Risks Related to Our Business and Industry

Additional Risks Related to Regulatory Matters

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Risks Related to Tax Matters

Risks Related to Ownership of our Class A Shares

Risks for U.S. Holders

Detailed Overview of Risk Factors

Risks Related to the Current Global Political, Regulatory and Economic Environment

The principal markets in which we operate are generally subject to greater financial, economic, legal and political risks than more developed markets. Such risks may have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Financial, economic, banking, legal and political risks in our markets, or an increase in the perceived risks associated with investing in emerging economies, could dampen foreign investment and adversely affect the economies of the countries in which we operate. For example, the current geopolitical situation, as well as volatility in oil prices (to which the Russian economy is particularly sensitive), may continue to have negative macroeconomic and other effects on the regions in which we operate, including increased volatility in currency values and a weaker overall business environment. In general, the Russian economy has experienced a high degree of volatility in the local currency, periods of high inflation rates and fluctuations in oil prices. Economic conditions continue to be uncertain and future changes may have negative effects on our business.  

The value of the Russian ruble has fluctuated significantly in recent periods. Although our revenues and expenses, including our personnel expenses, are both primarily denominated in Russian rubles, we may have to increase our personnel expenses from time to time in order to better compete with other companies that denominate their personnel expenses in currencies which appreciate in relation to the Russian ruble. A major portion of our capital expenditures, primarily for servers and networking equipment, although payable in rubles, is for imported goods and therefore can be materially affected by changes in the value of the ruble. In addition, our expenses related to the development of our business internationally, and, in some cases, for acquisitions, are often denominated in other currencies, including U.S. dollars and Euros. If the Russian ruble were to experience a prolonged and significant decline in value against foreign currencies, we could face material foreign currency exchange exposure, which may materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. See “Operating and Financial Review and

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Prospects—Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures About Market Risk”.

We face risks related to health epidemics and related crises, including the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandeic.

In recent years, there have been outbreaks of epidemics in various countries throughout the world. The current outbreak of a novel strain of coronavirus that causes COVID-19 has spread rapidly to many parts of the world, including Russia. The epidemic has resulted in quarantines, travel restrictions, and the temporary closure of stores and facilities. In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

Although some of our businesses, such as FoodTech, Media Services, and E-commerce performed well throughout 2020, others, including ride-hailing and advertising experienced significant pressures, particularly in the second quarter of 2020. While our business and the broader economy have strengthened as the pandemic-related restrictions have been relaxed in the second half of 2020 and into 2021, there is limited visibility on the sustainability and the further dynamic of the recovery across Yandex businesses still depend on the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic and potential furthe disruptions caused by the health crisis. Depending on the progression of the pandemic, the effectiveness of vaccines and political and social responses to the crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic may continue to have an adverse impact on some of our businesses.

The extent to which the COVID-19 crisis impacts our results in any given period will depend on future developments, which are still uncertain and cannot be predicted, including new information which may emerge concerning the severity of COVID-19 and its variants, and the actions to contain the virus or treat its impact, among others. These developments may also lead to changes in estimates and assumptions that affect the reported amounts of our assets and liabilities, and actual results could differ from those estimates. A prolonged or intensified disruption to normal economic activity or to our businesses could have a material adverse impact to our financial condition and results of operations.

The adoption and maintenance of international embargo, economic or other sanctions against Russia or certain persons in Russia may have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.

The United States, the European Union and certain other countries have imposed economic sanctions on certain Russian government officials, private individuals and Russian companies, as well as “sectoral” sanctions affecting specified types of transactions with named participants in certain industries, including named Russian financial institutions, and sanctions that prohibit most commercial activities of U.S. and EU persons in Crimea. In 2019 and 2020, these sanctions were prolonged and extended. There is significant uncertainty regarding the extent or timing of any potential further economic or trade sanctions or the potential easing of such measures, or the impact of the new presidential administration in the United States. Political and economic sanctions may affect the ability or willingness of our international customers to operate in Russia, which could negatively impact our revenue and profitability. Sanctions could also impede our ability to effectively manage our legal entities and operations in and outside of Russia. Although neither our parent company nor any of our operating subsidiaries are targets of U.S. or EU sanctions, our business has been adversely affected from time to time by the impact of sanctions on the broader economy and business climate in Russia.

Since May 2017, Yandex LLC and Yandex.Ukraine LLC, both subsidiaries of Yandex N.V., have been subject to Ukrainian sanctions, which have blocked Ukrainian users from accessing our services and websites. These sanctions, which were extended in 2020 for a further one year, ban all trade operations and require blocking of all assets, including bank accounts.  

In January 2018, pursuant to the Countering America’s Adversaries through Sanctions Act of 2017, the U.S. administration presented the U.S. Congress with a report on senior Russian political figures, “oligarchs” and “parastatal” entities. Our founder, executive director and substantial shareholder, Arkady Volozh, is one of nearly 100 persons included in one part of the so called “Kremlin List”, on the basis of his reported net worth. Although we are not aware of any intention on the part of the U.S. government to impose sanctions on Mr. Volozh, if Mr. Volozh were to become a target of sanctions, it could have a material adverse effect on our business. The applicable sanctions rules, or the authoritative interpretation of current rules by the relevant authorities, could change at any time. The potential actions that could be taken by regulators that could affect our business include the following:

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We rely on the continued availability, development and maintenance of the internet infrastructure in the countries in which we operate. Any errors, failures or disruption in the products and services provided by third-party providers of our principal internet connections and the equipment critical to our internet properties and services, or any regulatory limitations on the internet in Russia, could materially adversely affect our brand, business, financial condition, and results of operations.

Our success depends on the continued availability, development and maintenance of the internet infrastructure globally and particularly in the countries in which we operate. This includes maintenance of a reliable network backbone with the necessary speed, data capacity and security for providing reliable internet services. Any disruption in the network access provided by third parties or any failure by them to handle current or higher future volumes of use may significantly harm our business. We have experienced and expect to continue to experience interruptions and delays in service from time to time. Furthermore, we depend on hardware and software suppliers for prompt delivery, installation and service of servers and other equipment to deliver our services. Public health concerns or epidemics, such as the recent coronavirus outbreak, may affect the production or delivery capabilities of our suppliers and resulting quarantines or closures could further disrupt our supply chain. The internet infrastructure may also be unable to support the demands placed on it by growing numbers of users and time spent online or increased bandwidth requirements. Government regulation may also limit our access to adequate and reliable internet infrastructure. Any outages or delays resulting from inadequate internet infrastructure or due to problems with our third-party providers or new regulatory requirements could reduce the level of internet usage as well as our ability to provide our services to users, advertisers and network partners, which could materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

The law, which partly came into force in November 2019, introduced tighter regulation of traffic routing in the Russian internet. While it is not entirely clear yet how this regulation will be applied in practice, its implementation, among other things, may lead to a requirement that Russian internet traffic should be routed through Russian communication centers. This could reduce data transfer speed significantly and even result in interruptions and delays of the online services in the Russian internet.  

In December 2020, Russia adopted a number of laws applicable to internet governance, including tighter regulation of social networks, restrictions on the placement of publicly available personal data on the internet, prohibitions for information resources to practice censorship in the form of restrictions for distribution of socially significant information by the users of such information resources, and other matters. Significant amendments have been made to the provisions of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation on users' liability for libel (defamation) on the internet and to the provisions of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation imposing liability for

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violating the procedure for the deletion of prohibited information from the internet. The law also establishes administrative fines up to 20% of a company's annual turnover for non-deletion of information by an information resource, if such deletion is required by law. At present, the practice of applying these laws, as well as their impact on our business, is not completely clear. However, they may have a substantial impact on operation of our services.

The principal markets in which we operate offer an uncertain environment for investment and business activity that could have a material adverse effect on the value of our Class A shares, our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

The legal framework in which we operate continues to evolve. The current geopolitical environment could increase the risk of new legislative initiatives that could be seen as protecting a country’s national security and/or limiting foreign influence over the sectors in which we operate. In addition, there can be contradictions between different laws and regulations, and the enforcement of laws can be selective or unpredictable. At the same time, there is sometimes a perceived lack of judicial and prosecutorial independence from political, social and commercial forces. These factors could have a material adverse effect on our Class A shares and our business, financial condition, and results of operations. The fact that we are a high-profile company may heighten these risks.

There has been increased scrutiny in recent periods of technology businesses across the globe. Should our operating environment become more challenging because of a change in the regulation or perception of technology companies, our business, financial condition, and results of operations may be materially and adversely affected.

Around the world, technology companies are operating in an increasingly uncertain and challenging environment, in part due to increased scrutiny from policymakers, regulators and the general public. Such scrutiny has included concerns about business practices, market presence and strategic direction. A number of our competitors, including Google and Facebook, have received scrutiny in different jurisdictions over business practices, including the application of targeted advertising and data processing. Our partner in our Taxi joint venture, Uber, has received scrutiny over labor practices and licensing in many of the jurisdictions in which it operates. Our businesses have also been subject to increasing scrutiny in the markets in which we operate.

As an example, the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) has recently started to apply more invasive remedies to technology companies stipulating in its demands and orders exact changes that market participants should implement into their business processes in order to terminate the alleged violation (in contrast to more general requirements to eliminate the violation of the competition law). For instance, in February 2021 FAS notified Yandex that it finds indications of the abuse of dominance in the way that Yandex demonstrates enriched results in its search engine and required that Yandex undertakes a number of measures to stop the presumed discrimination (including potentially the removal of enriched results that are not fully available for third parties). See also “— The competent authorities could determine that we hold a dominant position in one or more of our markets and could impose limitations on our operational flexibility that may adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations”.

Restrictive trade practices in many jurisdictions, including the United States, have also made doing business more difficult for technology companies. For example, governments in a number of jurisdictions have been considering the possibility of excluding Huawei from participating as a supplier in 5G networks based on perceptions of the Chinese government's influence over Huawei. Should our business practices, market presence or strategic direction receive adverse scrutiny or experience increased regulation in any material market in which we operate, we may experience a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and result of operations.   

If existing limitations on foreign ownership were to be extended to our business, or if new limitations were to be adopted, it could materially adversely affect our group and the value of our Class A shares.

Applicable law restricts foreign (non-Russian) ownership or control of companies involved in certain strategically important activities in Russia as well as companies that are classified as "mass media" businesses. Currently, technology, the internet and online advertising are not industries specifically covered by this legislation, but proposals have from time to time been considered by the Russian government and the State Duma, which, if adopted, would impose foreign ownership or control restrictions on certain large technology or internet companies. 

In 2018 draft legislation that would restrict foreign ownership of news aggregators was introduced. The draft legislation is broadly worded and, if adopted, might be applied to Yandex.News and other services. At this time, we

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cannot anticipate if the draft legislation will be adopted or, if it is adopted, whether such restrictions will be applied to us. See also “Item 4. Government Regulation”.

Further, a draft law was proposed in mid-2019, for example, that was aimed at restricting foreign ownership of “significant” internet companies, which, if adopted, could have been applied to Yandex. A number of parties, including representatives of the Russian government, identified concerns with the draft law, and the proposal was withdrawn in November 2019.

Another draft law was submitted to the State Duma in December 2020 that is aimed at prohibiting foreign ownership in excess of 20% of a Russian audiovisual service, including online video streaming services. If such a law were to be adopted and would be applicable to Yandex, then we may be required to restructure certain of our services, such as KinoPoisk, which could fall under the definition.

We have also recently obtained an encryption license for our Yandex.Cloud service in order to expand this business. Therefore, the restrictions imposed by the strategic enterprises law have become applicable to Yandex as a whole. In particular, a third-party non-Russian investor would be required to obtain prior approval from the competent Russian authority in some cases if it seeks to acquire more than 25% of the voting power in Yandex or seeks to enter into an agreement that would establish direct or indirect control over Yandex. Such investors would also be required to notify the competent Russian authority if it acquires more than 5% of the voting power in Yandex. In addition, foreign states and international organizations, or entities controlled by them, are prohibited from entering into agreements to establish direct or indirect control over Yandex.

Notwithstanding the restructuring of our corporate governance approved in December 2019, we cannot assure you that new legislation restricting foreign ownership or control will not be proposed and adopted. Any new restrictions on non-Russian ownership or control could require us to take significant steps to modify our operating, corporate governance or ownership structure, which could have a material adverse effect on our operations, or the value of our Class A shares. See also “Item 4. Information on the Company – Governance Structure”.

Risks Related to Our Governance Structure

Although we implemented a restructuring of our corporate governance at the end of 2019, we may not be compliant with any legislation limiting foreign ownership or control in our sector that might ultimately be adopted. Any such non-compliance could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations and cash flows, as well as on the trading price of our Class A Shares.

Even following our corporate governance restructuring adopted in late 2019, we cannot assure you that our business will not become subject to new legislation that might ultimately be adopted with the goal of limiting foreign ownership or control of businesses in our sector. If our business becomes subject to, and is found not to be compliant with, any such legislation, we cannot assure you that enforcement actions against Yandex or our business by the Russian authorities will not be imposed. The imposition of such enforcement actions could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations and cash flows, as well as on the trading price of our Class A Shares. In addition, in the event that any such new restrictions are adopted, or if there is a perception that such restrictions might be forthcoming, our Board may determine that additional changes in our corporate governance structure are warranted in order to respond to such concerns and to protect the interests of our stakeholders. See also “Item 4. Information on the Company – Governance Structure”.

The Public Interest Foundation that was formed in connection with our corporate governance restructuring has important rights in our corporate governance structure. These rights could be exercised in a manner that is different from what we expect or that is not in the interests of our Class A shareholders.

The Public Interest Foundation has limited and targeted rights, through the powers associated with its holding of the Priority Share in Yandex N.V. and a so-called “Special Voting Interest” in Yandex LLC. The board of the Public Interest Foundation, as well as the designated directors on the Yandex N.V. board and any interim General Director of Yandex LLC appointed by the Foundation in the circumstances set out in the charter of Yandex LLC, may take actions, however, that are not in the interests of our stakeholders, including our Class A shareholders, or decline to approve actions that would be in the interests of our Class A shareholders. These actions could include exercising the veto right over the nomination of four members of our Board in such a way as to prevent the nomination of persons whom the

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other members of our Nominating Committee and Board believe would best serve the interests of our company and our shareholders. Moreover, these directors, together with the two designated directors, could act in a manner that results in Board deadlocks on material matters, such as budget approvals, that restrict our flexibility or ability to operate. Further, if the Public Interest Foundation exercised its right to use the Special Voting Interest in Yandex LLC in a manner that is inconsistent with our expectations, or if it did so repeatedly, it could disrupt our operations and materially adversely affect the public perception of our business. Any such actions could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations and cash flows, as well as on the trading price of our Class A Shares. The impact and perception of such actions could also make it difficult or impossible for us to access the public capital markets going forward.

In addition, the Russian legislative framework under which the Public Interest Foundation was incorporated is relatively new and there has been very limited experience with such legal form in practice. We may therefore face novel issues in connection with the untested mechanics of the Foundation legislation and supporting regulations.

See also “Item 4. Information on the Company – Governance Structure”.

The restructuring carried out at the end of 2019 introduced new elements of our corporate governance with which we previously had no experience, and the rights granted may be exercised in unexpected ways.

Although our restructuring was designed to provide targeted and specific governance rights, some of these rights are not precisely defined. For instance, what may constitute a “Special Situation” is not defined, although it is our understanding, based on our discussions with the relevant authorities, that such “Special Situations”, if they ever arose, would relate to an action, failure to act or practice by Yandex that was deemed to be materially adverse to the national security interest of Russian Federation. However, it is possible that the Foundation, by approval of at least seven of its directors, may interpret the scope of national security broadly and determine that there is a Special Situation in circumstances that we cannot foresee or reasonably consider to be related to the national security. It is possible that the powers granted to the Public Interest Foundation, the designated directors, the Public Interest Committee and any interim General Director may be exercised in unexpected ways, which may be adverse to the interests of Class A Shareholders and result in a decline in the trading price of our Class A Shares. See also “Item 4. Information on the Company – Governance Structure”.

Risks Related to Our Business and Industry

We face significant competition from major global and local companies, including Google, Mail.ru and Sberbank, which could negatively affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. If our competitors start to more rapidly develop their technologies, we may need to increase R&D investments to defend our market share.

We face strong competition in various aspects of our business from global and Russian companies that provide internet services and content, including search, ride-hailing and e-commerce services. Currently, we consider our principal competitors across our key verticals to be Google, Mail.ru, Facebook and Sberbank. 

Of the large global internet companies, we consider Google to be our principal competitor in a number of areas, including the market for desktop and mobile internet search, the market for performance-based advertising, online advertising network revenues, advertising intermediary services and distribution arrangements. According to Yandex.Radar, Google’s share of the Russian search market, based on search traffic generated, was 38.6% for the full year 2020 and 40.1% in 2019, compared with our market share of 59.2% in 2020, 57.0% in 2019 and 56.3% in 2018. Google conducts extensive online and offline advertising campaigns in Russia. In recent years, Google has actively marketed its products and services, including its mobile and voice search, YouTube (currently the leading social platform in Russia by audience and time spend), and advertising products for businesses, leading to increased competition.

With Android, its popular mobile platform, Google exerts significant influence over the increasingly important market for mobile and location-based search and advertising. Pursuant to a settlement between FAS and Google reached in April 2017, Google is prohibited from arrangements prohibiting pre-installation of rival applications and is required to provide a choice to users in selecting their default search engine in Russia. Following this settlement, our search share on the Android platform increased in 2018, 2019 and 2020. Nevertheless, we expect that Google will continue to use its brand recognition and global financial and engineering resources to compete aggressively with us, and can provide no

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assurance that Google is fully complying or will fully comply with the settlement.

We also view a number of social networking sites (VK, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and others) as increasingly significant competitors. In light of their large audiences and the significant amount of information they can access and analyze regarding their users’ needs, interests and habits, we believe that they may be able to create increased competition for us. The popularity of such sites may also reflect a growing shift in the way in which people find information, get answers and buy products, which may create additional competition to attract users.

On the domestic side, our principal competitor is Mail.ru Group. We compete with Mail.ru Group for online advertising budgets, allocated between social networks and search. Mail.ru Group also offers a wide range of internet services, including the most popular Russian web mail, and other services that are comparable to ours. Mail.ru’s search market share was 1.6% and 1.1% in 2019 and 2020, respectively. In addition, in August 2020 Mail.ru announced the expansion of the scope of its O2O joint venture with Sberbank, pursuant to which Sberbank and Mail.ru provided an additional RUB 12 billion of capital to grow the joint venture, including the recently acquired 2GIS mapping service and the Samokat express e-grocery delivery unit. The joint venture is focused on the expansion of food delivery (where our FoodTech business competes with Mail.ru Group’s Delivery Club service), ride-hailing (where our Yandex.Taxi business competes with Citymobil) and other services.

Our Taxi business, which is a joint venture with Uber which we completed in February 2018, also faces competition from Citymobil and a variety of other ride-hailing (Didi, regional offline players etc.), food delivery operators and dispatch services (Delivery Club, Samokat,Vprok, Okolo, SberMarket etc.) and car-sharing services (Delimobil, BelkaCar, etc.). We may also face new competitors given attractive long-term potential of the ride-hailing and food delivery.  

Yandex.Market faces competition from online retailers and marketplaces, including Wildberries, Ozon, AliExpress Russia (operated through a JV between Mail.ru, MegaFon, RDIF, and Alibaba) and others. We understand that Sberbank has announced plans to expand its digital ecosystem, with a high focus on developing e-commerce platform on the basis of their Sbermarket (grocery delivery service) and recently announced partnership to develop marketplace goods.ru together with M.Video.

In addition, our other business units, including Media Services, Classifieds, and Cloud, face significant competition in their respective business areas. 

On the Media Services front, our KinoPoisk service faces competition from ivi, Okko (operated by Rambler Group, which is now owned by Sberbank), Netflix and other online cinemas, while Yandex Music competes with VK Music and Boom (both operated by Mail.ru), Apple Music, and Spotify (entered the Russian market in 2020).

Our Classifieds business faces competition from a range of online and offline classified services, including Avito (in real estate, automobile sales, and general classifieds), CIAN (in real estate), and Drom (in automobile sales). Our public cloud platform competes with a number of international and local services, such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Rostelecom, Sberbank, Mail.ru.

We cannot guarantee you that we will be able to continue to compete effectively with current and future companies that may have greater ability to attract and retain users, greater brand recognition, more personnel and greater financial and other resources. If our competitors are successful in providing similar or better search results or other services compared with those we offer, we could experience a significant decline in user traffic or other business. Any such decline could negatively affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

We may experience slowdown of our online advertising revenue growth and downward pressure on our operating margin.

The rate of growth of our online advertising revenues may slow down over time as a result of a number of factors, including continuing macroeconomic challenges in Russia, increasing competition, changes in the nature of queries, the evolution of the overall online advertising market, the declining rate of growth in the number of internet users in Russia as overall internet penetration increases and the COVID-19 pandemic. A slower growth rate of our online advertising revenue growth may negatively impact the rate of growth of our revenues on a consolidated basis. The macroeconomic factors, competition, COVID-19 pandemic and other factors may also impact the dynamic of our

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revenue growth in non-advertising businesses.

The key factors which may cause the volatility of our operating margin including:

As the Russian internet market matures, our future expansion will increasingly depend on our ability to generate revenues from new businesses, from new business models or in other markets. If we do not continue to innovate and provide services that are useful and attractive to our users, we may be unable to retain them and may become less attractive to our advertisers, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

As internet usage has spread in Russia, the rate of growth in the number of internet users has been declining. Our success in our core business depends on providing search and other services that make using the internet a more useful and enjoyable experience for our users. As search technology continues to develop, our competitors may be able to offer search capabilities that are, or that are seen to be, substantially similar to, or better than ours. As our core market matures, we will need to provide new services, further exploit non-core business models, such as our Taxi, Classifieds, Media Services and Market business units, or expand into new geographic markets, in order to continue to grow our revenues at previously achieved levels. The cost we incur in these efforts, both in terms of product development expenses and advertising and marketing costs, could be significant.

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If we are unable to continue to develop and provide our users with high-quality, up-to-date services, and to appropriately time the services with market opportunities, or if we are unable to maintain the quality of such services, our user base may not grow, or may decline. Further, if we are unable to attract and retain a substantial share of internet traffic generated by mobile and other digital devices, or if we are slow to develop services and technologies that are compatible with such devices, our user base may not grow or may decline.

If our users move to our competitors, we will also become less attractive to advertisers and therefore to Yandex Advertising Network partners. This could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

The competition to capture market share on mobile devices is intense, and if we are not successful in maintaining substantial reach among users and monetizing search and other services on mobile devices, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be adversely affected.    

Users are increasingly accessing the internet through mobile and other devices rather than desktop and laptop personal computers, including through smartphones, wearable devices, and handheld computers such as tablets, as well as through video game consoles, smart TVs and television set-top devices. Such devices have different characteristics than desktop and laptop personal computers (including screen size, operating system, user interface and use patterns). Tailoring our products and services to such devices requires particular expertise and the expenditure of significant resources. The versions of our products and services developed for these devices, including the advertising solutions we offer, may be or become less attractive to users, advertisers, manufacturers or distributors of devices than those offered by our competitors or than our desktop offerings. The percentage of our total search traffic that was generated from mobile devices increased from approximately 58% in the fourth quarter of 2019 to approximately 60.5% in the fourth quarter of 2020, while the percentage of our search revenues generated from mobile devices increased from approximately 49% to approximately 53.3% between those periods.

Each manufacturer or distributor of mobile or other devices may establish unique technical standards for its devices, and as a result our products and services may not work or be viewable on these devices. Some manufacturers may also elect not to include our products on their devices, or may be prohibited from doing so pursuant to their agreements with other parties with respect to Android. Although Google is prohibited from arrangements restricting pre-installation of rival applications and is required to provide a choice to users in selecting their default search engine in Russia, it is difficult to anticipate the long-term effects of such changes on our market shares in its Chrome browser and Chrome widget. In addition, consumers are increasingly accessing content directly via applications, or “apps”, tailored to particular mobile devices or in closed social media platforms, which could affect our share of the search market over time. As new devices and platforms are continually being released, it is difficult to predict the challenges we may encounter in adapting our products and services and developing competitive new products and services. See also “As the internet evolves, an increasing amount of online content may be held in closed social networks, mobile apps or proprietary document formats, which may limit the effectiveness of our search technology, which could adversely affect our brand, business, financial condition and results of operations.”

We expect to continue to devote significant resources to the creation, support and maintenance of mobile products and services for all major operating systems including Android and iOS. If we are unable to attract and retain a substantial number of device manufacturers, distributors and users to our products and services, or if we are slow to develop products and technologies that are compatible with such devices and platforms, we will fail to capture the opportunities available due to consumers’ and advertisers’ transition to a dynamic, multi-screen environment. Furthermore, given the importance to the successful operation of our business of distribution and application pre-installation arrangements with the most popular device manufacturers, failure to reach such arrangements may adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

We generate a substantial part of our revenues from advertising, which is cyclical and seasonal in nature, and any reduction in spending by or loss of advertisers would materially adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

In the past several years, we continued to diversify our business, and as a result the share of our revenues generated from advertising has declined from 80% in 2018 to 58% in 2020. Nevertheless, advertising still remains the largest business for Yandex and the biggest contributor to our group revenue and operating profit. Expenditures by advertisers tend to be cyclical, reflecting the overall economic conditions and budgeting and buying patterns, and can therefore fluctuate significantly. According to AKAR, the rate of growth in online advertising expenditures was 4% in

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2020, compared to 20% in 2019 and 22% in 2018. Any decreases in online advertising spending due to economic conditions, or other reasons, could materially adversely impact our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Advertising spending and user traffic also tend to be seasonal, with internet usage, advertising expenditures and traffic historically slowing down during the months, when there are extended Russian public holidays and vacations, and increasing significantly in the fourth quarter of each year. For these reasons, comparing our results of operations on a period-to-period basis may not be meaningful, and past results should not be relied upon as an indication of future performance. Furthermore, as our business becomes more diversified, seasonal changes may have different effects on various lines of business.

Any decline in the internet as a significant advertising platform in the countries in which we operate could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.

We have significantly diversified our revenue streams in the recent years; however, the sale of online advertising in Russia still accounts for a sizeable portion of our overall revenue. Although the use of the internet as a marketing channel in Russia is already mature, the internet continues competing with traditional advertising media, such as television, print, radio and outdoor advertising. Although advertisers have become more familiar with online advertising in recent years, some of our current and potential customers still have limited experience with online advertising and have not historically devoted a significant portion of their marketing budgets to online marketing and promotion. As a result, they may be less inclined to consider the internet effective in promoting their products and services compared with traditional media.

Any decline in the appeal of the internet generally in Russia or the other countries in which we operate, whether as a result of increasing governmental regulation of the internet, the growth in popularity of other forms of media, a decline in the attractiveness of the internet as an advertising medium or any other factor, could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Several of our businesses operate through joint ventures with third parties, which involves risks that we do not face with respect to our core business.

Our Yandex.Taxi business operate as joint ventures with Uber, and Uber has a significant minority stake in our Self-Driving Group. We have from time to time entered into joint ventures with other partners in respect of other businesses. Our partners have or may have certain shareholder and contractual rights in respect of the management of these joint ventures, and therefore we may not have sole control over the management or operations of our joint ventures. The level of control exercisable by us depends on the size of our interest and the terms of the contractual agreements, in particular, the allocation of control among, and continued cooperation between, the participants.

We may face financial, reputational and other exposure (including regulatory actions) in the event that any of our partners fail to meet their obligations under the arrangements, encounter financial difficulty, or fail to comply with local or international regulation and standards. A temporary or permanent disruption to these arrangements, such as through significant deterioration in the reputation, financial position or other circumstances of the third party or material failure in controls, could adversely affect our results of operations.

The formation and operation of joint ventures and other partnerships involve significant challenges and risks, including:

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Additionally, if we or one of our joint venture or other partners fail to maintain and enhance the Yandex brand, or if we incur excessive expenses in our efforts to do so, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be materially adversely affected.

We rely on partners for a material portion of our revenues and, in particular, for expanding our user base via distribution arrangements. Any failure to obtain or maintain such relationships on reasonable terms could have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Revenues from advertising on our Advertising Network partner websites represented 16.8% of our online advertising revenues in 2020 compared with 20.8% in 2019. We consider our ad partner network to be important for the continued growth of our business. Our agreements with our network partners are generally terminable at any time without cause. Our competitors could offer more favorable terms to our current or potential network partners, including guaranteed minimum revenues or other more advantageous revenue-sharing arrangements, in an effort to take market share away from us. If our network partners decide to use a competitor’s advertising services, our revenues would decline.

The number of paid clicks and amount of revenues that we derive from our partners in the Yandex Advertising Network depends on, among other factors, the quality of their websites and their attractiveness to users and advertisers. Although we screen new applicants, favor websites with high-quality content and stable audiences, and strive to monitor the quality of the network partner websites on an ongoing basis, these websites are operated by independent third parties that we do not control. If our network partners’ websites deteriorate in quality or otherwise fail to provide interesting and relevant content and services to their users, this may result in reduced attractiveness to their users and our advertisers, which may adversely impact our business, financial condition and results of operations.

To expand our user base and increase traffic to our sites and mobile applications, we enter into arrangements with leading software companies and device manufacturers for the distribution of our services and technology. In particular, we have agreements, on a co-marketing basis, with certain internet browsers. As new methods for accessing the internet become available, including through new digital platforms and devices, we may need to enter into new or amended distribution agreements. See also “—The competition to capture market share on mobile devices is intense, and if we are not successful in maintaining substantial reach among users and monetizing search and other services on mobile devices, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be adversely affected.”

Our most significant distribution partners in 2020 were Samsung, Xiaomi, and Opera, which preinstall our applications on their devices in Russia and/or on their mobile and desktop browsers. Original equipment manufacturers (Samsung and Xiaomi) have become increasingly important partners due to mobile traffic growth over the last few years. Each of our other distribution partners constitutes less than 11% of our total distribution traffic acquisition costs. If we are unable to continue our arrangements with current key distribution partners, or maintain existing or enter into comparable arrangements with new distribution partners, particularly for the distribution of our search and other services on mobile devices, this would likely have a negative effect on our search market share over time. In the future, existing and potential distribution partners may not offer or renew distribution arrangements on reasonable terms for us, or at all, which could limit our ability to maintain and expand our user base, and could have a material adverse effect on our

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business, financial condition and results of operations.

Our business units and joint ventures face comparable risks. For example, if we are unable to attract or maintain a critical mass of Taxi partners, consumers, couriers, restaurants, grocery stores, whether as a result of competition or other factors, our ride-hailing and food delivery services could become less appealing to users, and our financial results could be adversely impacted.

Our business (in particular, Search and Portal and Media Services) depends on our ability to license, acquire or create compelling content at reasonable costs. Failure to offer compelling content would harm our ability to expand our base of users, advertisers and network partners.

We license much of our content from third parties, such as video content, music, news items, weather reports and TV program schedules. If we are unable to maintain and build relationships with third-party content providers, this would likely result in a loss of user traffic. In addition, we may be required to make substantial payments to third parties from whom we license or acquire such content. An increase in the prices charged to us by third-party content providers would adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. In addition, many of our content licenses with third parties are non-exclusive. Accordingly, other websites and streaming platforms, as well as other media such as television, may be able to offer similar or identical content. If other companies make available competitive content, the number of users of our services may not grow as anticipated, or may decline. This increases the importance of our ability to aggregate compelling content in order to differentiate Yandex from other businesses.

Our business benefits from a strong brand. Failure to maintain and enhance our brand would materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and result of operations.

We believe that the brand identity that we have developed through the strength of our technology, our user focus, our independence from political considerations and, in particular, our ability to deliver relevant answers and recommendations, has significantly contributed to the success of our business. We also believe that maintaining and enhancing the Yandex brand, including through continued significant marketing efforts, is critical to expanding our base of users, advertisers, advertising network partners, and other business partners. We have also from time to time established joint ventures or other partnerships with respect to some of our business units. Although we have sought to implement appropriate controls and protections, depending on specific terms of joint venture or partnership arrangements we may have more limited ability to ensure that these businesses are operated in a manner that is consistent with the broader Yandex brand.

Maintaining and enhancing our brand, especially in relation to mobile services, will depend largely on our ability to continue to be a technology leader and a provider of high-quality, reliable services, which we may not continue to do successfully.

If we fail to manage effectively the growth and increasing complexity of our operations, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be adversely affected.

We have experienced, and continue to experience, growth in and diversification of our operations, which has placed, and will continue to place, significant demands on our management and our operational and financial infrastructure.

We operate certain of our services through separate business units in order to facilitate the growth of those services. Management of these separate business units, some of which now operate or have operated as joint ventures with third-party partners, requires additional administrative effort, which may put strain on our management and other resources. If we do not effectively manage our growth and the operation of our business units, the quality of our services could suffer, which could adversely affect our brand, business, financial condition and results of operations.

As our user and advertiser bases expand, we will need to continue to increase our investment in technology, infrastructure, facilities and other areas of operations, in particular product development, sales and marketing. As a result of such growth, we will also need to continue to improve our operational and financial systems and managerial controls and procedures. We will have to maintain close coordination among our technical, accounting, finance, marketing and sales personnel. If the improvements are not implemented successfully, our ability to manage our growth will be impaired and we may have to make significant additional expenditures, which could harm our business, financial

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condition and results of operations.

Growth in our operations internationally may create increased risks that could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

We have limited experience with operations outside Russia, and in 2020 derived only approximately 6.5% of our revenues from international markets. Part of our future growth strategy is to expand our operations geographically on an opportunistic basis. Our ability to manage our business and conduct our operations across a broader range of geographies will require considerable management attention and resources and is subject to a number of risks relating to international markets, including the following:

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In addition, compliance with complex and potentially conflicting foreign and Russian laws and regulations that apply to our international operations may increase our cost of doing business and may interfere with our ability to offer, or prevent us from offering, our services in one or more countries. These numerous laws and regulations include import and export requirements, content requirements, trade restrictions, tax laws, economic sanctions, internal and disclosure control rules, data protection, data retention, privacy and filtering requirements, labor relations laws, U.S. laws, such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and local laws prohibiting corrupt payments to governmental officials. Violations of these laws and regulations may result in fines; criminal sanctions against us, our officers, or our employees; prohibitions on the conduct of our business; and damage to our reputation. Although we have implemented policies and procedures designed to ensure compliance with these laws, we cannot assure you that our employees, contractors or agents will not violate our policies. Any such violations may result in prohibitions on our ability to offer our services in one or more countries, and may also materially adversely affect our reputation, our brand, our international expansion efforts, our ability to attract and retain employees, and our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Our corporate culture has contributed to our success, and if we cannot maintain the focus on teamwork and innovation fostered by this environment, our business, financial condition and results of operations would be adversely affected.

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We believe that a critical contributor to our success has been our corporate culture, which values and fosters teamwork and innovation. As our business matures and diversifies, and we are required to implement more complex organizational management structures, including those introduced in connection with our recently implemented corporate governance changes, we may find it increasingly difficult to maintain the beneficial aspects of our corporate culture. We operate a number of our services through separate business units, in order in part to maintain the “start-up spirit” and provide greater strategic and operational focus for these units. We also operate or have previously operated several of our business units as joint ventures with other parties and may establish new joint ventures in future. In such situations our efforts in maintaining our corporate culture may not be successful, which would adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. In particular, the spin-off of certain business units or further establishment of joint ventures and partnerships may cause the loss of some of our clients or users, or disruption in the provision of the services that are being carved out, and may require additional attention from our management.

The loss of any of our key personnel, or a failure to attract, retain and motivate qualified personnel, may have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Our success depends in large part upon the continued service of key members of our management team and technical personnel, as well as our continued ability to attract, retain and motivate other highly qualified engineering, programming, technical, sales, customer support, financial and managerial personnel.

Although we attempt to structure employee compensation packages in a manner consistent with the evolving standards of the markets in which we operate and to provide incentives to remain with Yandex, including equity awards under our employee incentive plans, we cannot guarantee that we will be able to retain our key employees. Although we grant additional equity awards to management personnel and other key employees from time to time, employees may be more likely to leave us after their initial awards fully vest. Decline of the market value of our shares could also make such equity awards less effective in retaining our key employees. If any member of our senior management team or other key personnel should leave our group, our ability to successfully operate our business and execute our business strategy could be impaired. We may also have to incur significant costs in identifying, hiring, training and retaining replacements for departing employees.

The competition for software engineers and qualified personnel who are familiar with the internet industry in Russia is intense. We may encounter difficulty in hiring and/or retaining highly talented software engineers to develop and maintain our services. There is also significant competition for personnel who are knowledgeable about the accounting and legal requirements related to a NASDAQ listing, and we may encounter difficulty in hiring and/or retaining appropriate financial staff needed to enable us to continue to comply with the internal control requirements under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and related regulations. Any inability to successfully retain key employees and manage our personnel needs may have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.

If our security measures are breached, malicious applications interfere with or exploit security flaws in our services, or our services are subject to attacks that degrade or deny the ability of users to access our products and services, our products and services may be perceived as not being secure, users and customers may curtail or stop using our products and services, and we may incur significant legal and financial exposure.

Third parties have in the past attempted, and may in the future attempt, to use malicious applications to interfere with our services and may disrupt our ability to connect with our users. Such interference often occurs without disclosure to or consent from users, resulting in a negative experience that users may associate with Yandex. Such an attack could also lead to the destruction or theft of information, potentially including confidential or proprietary information relating to Yandex’s intellectual property, content and users. For example, if a third party were to hack into our network, they could obtain access to our search code or to user data. Because the techniques used to obtain unauthorized access, disable or degrade service, or sabotage systems change frequently and often are not recognized until launched against a target, we may be unable to anticipate these techniques or implement adequate preventative measures. If an actual or perceived breach of our security occurs, the market perception of the effectiveness of our security measures could be harmed and we could lose users and customers.

Although we maintain substantial security measures, such measures may also be breached due to employee error, malfeasance, system errors or vulnerabilities, fraudulent actions of outside parties, or otherwise. For example, in February 2021 we announced that a data breach had been discovered during routine screening by our security team, in which an employee had provided unauthorized access to users’ accounts for personal gain. Such security breaches may

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expose us to a risk of loss of company information or user data, litigation, remediation costs, increased costs for security measures, loss of revenue, damage to our reputation, and potential liability.

In addition, we offer applications and services that our users download to their devices or that they rely on to store information and transmit information to others over the internet. These services are subject to attack by viruses, worms and other malicious software programs, which could jeopardize the security of information stored in a user’s device or in our computer systems and networks. These applications may be difficult to remove or disable, may reinstall themselves and may circumvent other applications’ efforts to block or remove them. If our efforts to combat these malicious applications are unsuccessful, or if our services have actual or perceived vulnerabilities, our reputation may be harmed, our user traffic could decline, and our communications with certain users could be impaired, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Our business depends on the accuracy and reliability of our search results and dependability of our ride-hailing, food delivery, e-commerce, streaming and other services. A systems failure, technical interference or human error could prevent us from providing accurate search results or ads or reliably deliver our other services, which could lead to a loss of users and advertisers and damage our reputation and materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Our business depends on our ability to provide accurate and reliable search results and other user services, which may be disrupted. For example, because our search technology ranks a webpage’s relevance based in part on the importance of the websites that link to it, people have attempted to link groups of websites together to manipulate search results. If our efforts to combat these and other types of “index spamming” are unsuccessful, our reputation for delivering relevant results could be harmed. This could result in a decline in user traffic, which may adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

We seek to ensure the speed and reliability of our services regardless of the user’s location by operating our own Content Delivery Network (CDN) in points of presence in major cities throughout Russia and other countries in which we operate. This network allows us to support reliable 24/7 operations, including server-based computations, research and development work, and user and advertiser services. We use proprietary computer architecture to link these clusters of servers, as well as proprietary computational software that operates across these distributed servers, including software that enables us to deploy and monitor software across our systems. This allows us to use relatively inexpensive off-the-shelf servers as the foundation of our robust and effective systems for redundant, distributed data storage, retrieval and distributed calculations. Geographic distribution of our servers increases the access speed for our services and increases the stability and dependability of our service offerings. This structure provides redundant fail-safe capacity such that the failure of a single facility would not cause our websites to stop functioning.

Nevertheless, although we maintain robust network security measures, our systems are potentially vulnerable to damage or interruption from terrorist attacks, denial-of-service attacks, computer viruses or other cyber-attacks or attempts to harm our system, power losses, telecommunications failures, floods, fires, extreme weather conditions, earthquakes and similar events. Our data centers are also potentially subject to break-ins, sabotage and intentional acts of vandalism, and to potential disruptions. The occurrence of a natural disaster or other unanticipated problems at our data centers could result in lengthy interruptions in our service, or a pandemic or an outbreak of disease or similar public health concern, such as the recent coronavirus outbreak, or fear of such an event, could result in reduced customer traffic and consumer spending or labor shortages and delays in manufacturing and shipment of products. In each case, such events which could reduce our revenues and profits, and our brand could be damaged if people believe our services are unreliable.

From time to time, we have experienced power outages that have interrupted access to our services and impacted the functioning of our internal systems. Although we maintain back-up generators, these may not operate properly through a major sustained power outage or their fuel supply could be inadequate. Any unscheduled interruption in our services places a burden on our entire organization and would result in an immediate loss of revenue. If we experience frequent or persistent system failures on our websites, our reputation and brand could be permanently harmed. The steps we have taken to increase the reliability and redundancy of our systems are expensive, reduce our operating margin and may be insufficient to reduce the frequency or duration of unscheduled downtime.

Although we test software updates before implementation and there were no significant downtime periods in recent years, errors made by our employees in maintaining or expanding our systems may damage our brand and may

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have a materially adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.

We may not be able to prevent others from unauthorized use of our intellectual property rights, which may adversely affect our competitive position, our business, financial condition and results of operations.

We rely on a combination of patents, trademarks, trade secrets and copyrights, as well as nondisclosure agreements, to protect our intellectual property rights. Our patent department is responsible for developing and implementing our group-wide patent protection strategy in selected jurisdictions, and to date we have filed more than 950 patent applications, of which more than 600 have resulted in issued patents. The protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights in Russia and other markets in which we operate, however, may not be as effective as that in the United States or Western Europe. Also, the efforts we have taken to protect our proprietary rights may not be sufficient or effective. Any significant infringement of our intellectual property rights could harm our business, our brand and/or our ability to compete, all of which could adversely affect our competitive position, our business, financial condition and results of operations.

We may be subject to intellectual property infringement claims, which are costly to defend, could result in significant damage awards, and could limit our ability to provide certain content or use certain technologies in the future.

A number of internet, technology, media and patent-holding companies own or are actively developing patents covering search, indexing, electronic commerce and other internet-related technologies, as well as a variety of online business models and methods. We believe that these parties will continue to take steps to protect these technologies, including, but not limited to, seeking patent protection in certain jurisdictions. As a result, disputes regarding the ownership of technologies and rights associated with online activities are likely to arise in the future. In addition, use of open-source software is often subject to compliance with certain license terms, which we may inadvertently breach.

With respect to any intellectual property rights claim, we may have to pay damages or compensation and/or stop using technology found to be in violation of a third party’s rights. We may have to seek a license for the technology, which may not be available on commercially reasonable terms or at all, and may significantly increase our operating expenses. We may be required to develop an alternative non-infringing technology, which may require significant effort, expense and time to develop. If we cannot license or develop technology for any potentially infringing aspects of our business, we may be forced to limit our service offerings and may be unable to compete effectively. We may also incur substantial expenses in defending against third-party infringement claims regardless of the merit of such claims.

We may be subject to claims from our current or former employees as well as contractors for copyright, trade secret and patent-related matters, which are costly to defend, and which could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operation.

Unlike the video and other content that we license from third parties, the software, databases, algorithms, images, patentable intellectual property, trade secrets and know-how that we use for the operation of our services were generally developed, invented or created by our former or current employees or contractors during the course of their employment with us within the scope of their job functions or under the relevant contractor’s agreement, as the case may be. As a matter of Russian law, we are deemed to have acquired copyright and related rights as well as rights to file patent applications with respect to such products and have the intellectual property rights required for their further use and disposal subject to compliance with certain requirements set out in the Civil Code of Russia. We believe that we have appropriately followed such requirements, but they are defined in a broad and ambiguous manner and their precise application has never been definitively determined by the Russian courts. Therefore, former or current employees or contractors could either challenge the transfer of intellectual property rights over the products developed by them or with their contribution or claim the right to additional compensation for their works for hire and/or patentable results, in addition to their employment compensation. We may not prevail in any such action and any successful claim, although unlikely to be material, could adversely affect our business and results of operation.

We may be held liable for information or content displayed on, retrieved by or linked to our websites and mobile applications, or distributed by our users; or we may be required to block certain content or access to our websites could be restricted; any of which could harm our reputation, business, financial condition and results of operations.

The law and enforcement practice relating to the liability of providers of online services for the activities of their users is currently not settled in Russia and certain other countries in which we operate. Claims may be brought

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against us for defamation, libel, negligence, copyright, patent or trademark infringement, tort (including personal injury), fraud, other unlawful activity or other theories and claims based on the nature and content of information to which we link or that may be posted online via blogs and message boards, generated by our users or delivered or shared through our services, including if appropriate licenses and/or rights holder’s consents have not been obtained. For example, we have previously been involved in litigation regarding alleged copyright infringement in the United States. We are also regularly required to remove content uploaded by users on grounds of alleged copyright infringement, and from time to time we receive requests from individuals who do not want their names or websites to appear in our search results. In addition, under the applicable laws companies and their officers may be held liable for the failure to delete or to stop distributing such information as is required by a court enforcement officer’s act. The liability may include penalties for companies and imprisonment for officers. 

Third parties may also seek to assert claims against us alleging unfair competition, data misappropriation, violations of privacy rights or failure to maintain the confidentiality of user data. Our defense of any such actions could be costly and involve significant time and attention of our management and other resources. If any of these complaints results in liability to us, the judgment or settlement could potentially be costly, encourage similar lawsuits, and harm our reputation and possibly our business.

The governments of the countries in which we operate are increasingly developing legislation aimed at regulation of the internet, in many places expanding liability and creating new obligations for companies that operate in the internet. For example, under the law “On Information, Information Technologies and on the Protection of Information”, we are required to delete from our search engine search results linking to websites that have been blocked in Russia for repeated copyright infringements.

Additional recent legislation in Russia has introduced a system of information and website blocking measures both to prevent and stop copyright and related rights infringements and to prevent dissemination of illegal information, such as child pornography, content encouraging suicides and drug use, information on minors hurt by illegal actions and extremist information. The regulations generally require a request from a governmental authority to take down the allegedly infringing or illegal information prior to blocking of a particular website. However, in some cases, such as dissemination of extremist information, access to such information can be blocked without notification or prior judicial scrutiny. Moreover, under recent legislative amendments a website may be blocked if the information published there contains disrespectful and indecent statements about the society, state, Constitution or governmental authorities. Additionally, the subjects who are accused of disseminating such statements can face administrative fines.

If we fail to identify the above-mentioned types of information and delete them from our websites in timely manner, our websites might be blocked and our business may be materially adversely affected.

New legislation and regulations may impose additional requirements on us and our operations and lead to material legal liability, which can be difficult to foresee or limit. For instance, in December 2020 the European Commission proposed the draft of the Digital Services Act which is aimed at creating a common set of rules on obligations and accountability of online intermediaries providing services in the EU. The document is now under consideration of the European Parliament and Member States and, if adopted, could impose new obligations on our services provided (or to be provided in the future) to users in the EU.

In addition, in 2018 we became party to an anti-piracy memorandum signed between major Russian IT companies and copyright holders. This memorandum stipulates an out-of-court procedure that obligates search engines and internet resources to remove URLs to infringing audio-visual content at the request of the rights holders. The memorandum was initially valid until September 1, 2019 but was prolonged until August 1, 2021 and is currently in force. It is planned that a corresponding draft law will be elaborated on the basis of this memorandum. Apart from that, under a recent resolution of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, liability may be imposed for the provision of access to materials that violate IP rights. We believe that according to the wording of the decision, this norm should be applicable only to owners of websites where such materials are published. However, there is no assurance that courts would not interpret this provision more broadly and would not apply this norm to Yandex.

The categories of illegal information to which access can be restricted may be interpreted broadly or be expanded. In certain cases, even removal of illegal information does not eliminate the risk of website blocking or reinstate access to the blocked website.

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For example, Russian legislation allows for permanent blocking of websites for repeated violation of copyright and related rights. A number of large websites have been blocked pursuant to this legislation so far, including, for example, a major hosting provider. We may be subject to unpredictable blocking measures, injunctions or court decisions that may require us to block or remove content and may adversely affect our services and operations. In addition, to ensure compliance with such laws, we may be required to commit greater resources, or to limit functionality of our services, which may adversely affect the appeal of our services to our customers. Although we believe that we are in full compliance with applicable laws, the application of new norms by government authorities might be sometimes inconsistent or unpredictable. In addition, draft legislation under consideration by the Russian State Duma describes the process of limiting access to a “program application” that contain materials violating copyright and related rights. The wording of the proposal is rather broad, and it is difficult to predict how this norm, if adopted, would be applied in practice (in particular, how a “program application” would be defined) and how this might affect all our applications. Potential legislation regarding measurement of the internet audience and social advertising could adversely affect our business.

We understand that discussions are ongoing among the relevant government authorities in Russia regarding the potential introduction of a mandatory system for the measurement of the audience of internet services and content by a specially designated uniform measurements organization, which would provide the state authorities with measurement reports on the internet audience (similar to the mandatory measurement of the TV audience). Such requirements may impose obligations on popular internet resources in Russia (including those provided by Yandex) to either integrate required data collection and reporting instruments or to ensure independent collection of the data and information required for the measurement of the internet audience, and to transfer such data to the designated measurements organization. Although the parameters of the proposed measurement system are not known, it is possible that the operation of such system could adversely affect our ability to ensure the security of our information and our user data. Such system could also provide competitive advantages to the measurements organization, which may itself have commercial interests. Furthermore, such a system may provide competitive advatages to our foreign-based competitors, such as Google and Facebook, which may not be subject to penaties for noncompliance with these requirements.

In addition, we understand that the relevant authorities, (including within the State Duma of the Russian Federation) are considering proposals to impose a mandatory obligation on all internet advertising platforms and distributors of advertising to place “social advertising” (i.e., ads related to the promotion of charities, socially useful activities and governmental functions) in their inventory free of charge, in an amount up to 5% of their commercial advertising inventory (calculated on the basis of the preceding year). The draft legislative proposal would also establish a designated operator of social advertising on the internet, which would be authorized to use the 5% free-of-charge quota to place social ads. The exact mechanics and parameters of this proposal are not currently known. If adopted, however, such a proposal could reduce our commercial advertising inventory, and could result in increases in the price of commercial advertising and the potential loss of commercial advertisers.

As the internet evolves, an increasing amount of online content may be held in closed social networks, mobile apps or proprietary document formats, which may limit the effectiveness of our search technology, which could adversely affect our brand, business, financial condition and results of operations.

Social networks are important players in the internet market and have a significant degree of control over the manner and extent to which information on their websites can be accessed through third-party search engines. Information can also be stored in other closed systems, such as mobile apps.

If social or other networks or software providers take steps to prevent their content or documents in their formats from being searchable, such content would not be included in our search results even if the content was directly relevant to a search request. These parties may also seek to require us to pay them royalties in exchange for giving us the ability to search content on their sites, in their networks or documents in their format and provide links thereto in our search results. If these parties also compete with us in the search business, they may give their search technology a preferential ability to search their content or documents in their proprietary format. Any of these results could adversely affect our brand, business, financial condition and results of operations.

We may have difficulty in continuing to scale and adapt our existing technology architecture to accommodate increased traffic and technology advances or new requirements of our users and advertisers, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

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With some of the most highly visited websites in Russia, we deliver a growing number of services, page views and video programs to an increasing number of users. In addition, the services we offer have expanded and changed significantly and are expected to continue to do so in the future to accommodate bandwidth-intensive technologies and means of content delivery, such as interactive multimedia and video. Our future success will depend on our ability to adapt to rapidly changing technologies, to adjust our services to evolving industry standards and to maintain the performance and reliability of our services. Rapid increases in the levels or types of use of our online services could result in delays or interruptions in our services.

As we expand our services, we will need to continue to invest in new technology infrastructure, including data centers. We may have difficulty in continuing to expand our infrastructure to meet increased demand for our services, including difficulties in obtaining suitable facilities or access to sufficient electricity supplies. A failure to expand our infrastructure could materially and adversely affect our ability to maintain and increase our revenues and profitability and could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Certain technologies could block our ads, which may adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Advertising displayed on our platforms may be interfered with by third parties, which may adversely affect our ability to attract advertisers. For example, third parties had in the past, and may in the future, employ technologies to block the display of ads on webpages. The wide and effective use of ad-blocking technologies can reduce the amount of revenue generated by the ads we serve and decrease the confidence of our advertisers and Yandex Advertising Network partners in our advertising technology, which may adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

If we fail to detect impressions and click fraud or other fraudulent activity or if our partners (including Yandex Advertising Network partners) disagree with our fraud detection techniques, we may face litigation and may lose the confidence of our advertisers or partners which may adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

We are exposed to the risk of fraudulent and invalid impressions and clicks on the ads we serve from a variety of potential sources. Invalid impressions and clicks are those that we have determined are not intended by the user to view or access the underlying content, including impressions and clicks resulting from fraud executed by automated scripts of computer programs. We monitor our own websites and those of our partners for click fraud and proactively seek to prevent such fraud and filter out fraudulent or other invalid impressions and clicks. To the extent that we are unsuccessful in doing so, we credit our advertisers for impression or clicks that are later attributed to fraud. If we are unable to stop this activity, these credits to our advertisers or the amounts we pay to our partners for such invalid impressions and clicks may increase, and could exceed what they have actually earned. This could negatively affect our profitability, and these invalid impressions and clicks could result in legal claims or harm our brand.

We acquire complementary businesses, teams and technologies from time to time, and may fail to identify additional suitable targets, acquire them on acceptable terms or successfully integrate them, which may limit our ability to implement our growth strategy. Acquisitions of new businesses may also lead to increased legal risks and other negative consequences, which could have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.

We regularly acquire other businesses, technologies and teams. The acquisition and integration of new businesses, technologies and people pose significant risks to our existing operations, including:

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The integration of new businesses presents a number of challenges, including differing cultures or management styles, the complexities of operational or technical integration, poor financial records or internal controls on the part of the acquired companies, and an inability to establish control over cash flows. Furthermore, even if we are successful in integrating new businesses, expected cost and operating efficiencies may not materialize, the financial benefits from the acquisition may be less than anticipated, and we could be required to record impairment changes as a result of under-performing assets.

Moreover, our growth may suffer if we fail to identify suitable acquisition targets or are outbid by competing bidders. As a NASDAQ-listed company, we are subject to securities laws and regulations that, in certain circumstances, require that we file with the SEC audited historical financial statements for businesses we acquire that exceed certain materiality thresholds. Given financial reporting practices in Russia and other countries in which we operate, such financial statements and documented systems of internal controls over financial reporting are often not readily available or not capable of being audited to the standards required by U.S. securities regulations. As a result, we may be prevented from or delayed in pursuing acquisition opportunities that our competitors and other financial and strategic investors are able to pursue, which may limit our ability to implement our growth strategy.

Failure to maintain effective customer service may result in customer complaints and negative publicity and may adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Customer complaints or negative publicity about our services or those offered by us (including services offered by our business units) or one of our joint ventures, or breaches of customers’ privacy or of our security measures, could diminish consumer confidence in and use of our services. Measures we implement to combat risks of fraud and breaches of privacy and security may be viewed as onerous by our customers or those of our joint ventures and damage relations with them. Alternately, should breaches of customers’ privacy or of security measures occur, we could be subject to investigations and claims from governmental bodies, as well as from our customers. These measures heighten the need for prompt and accurate customer service to resolve irregularities and disputes. Effective customer service requires significant personnel expense, and such expense, if not managed properly, may impact our profitability or that of one or more of our joint ventures. Any inability by us or our joint ventures to manage or train our or their customer service representatives properly could compromise our or their ability to handle customer complaints effectively. In case of failure to maintain effective customer service by us or by one of our joint ventures, our reputation may suffer, and we may lose our customers’ confidence, which may adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

The inherent limitations of the available data regarding internet usage and online advertising may make it difficult to assess our markets and our market position. 

We rely on and refer to information and statistics from various third-party sources, as well as our own internal estimates, regarding internet usage and penetration and the online advertising markets in the countries in which we operate. The information and statistics used in our industry are subject to inherent limitations reflecting the differing metrics and measurement methods utilized and applied by different sources; for example, data derived from computer usage contrasted to that derived from user surveys. In addition, while we believe that the available data and research on the Russian market is of comparable quality to that available in most developed countries, the data for certain other countries in which we operate, including Kazakhstan and Belarus, are generally less consistent and reliable due to more limited third-party measurements in those countries.

We have started the construction of our new headquarters, which involves significant risks, including those beyond our control. Construction delays may result in material expenses and distraction of management attention.

Our Russian headquarters are currently located in approximately 64,000 square meters of rented property in central Moscow, with leases generally expiring in 2024. We also lease additional office space of approximately 47,000 square meters in business centers in central Moscow, which houses some of our divisions. In order to secure sufficient

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office space to support our expected future growth, in December 2018 we acquired a property site for a new Moscow headquarters situated at 15 Kosygina Street. Even though we have managed to develop a design package for the site and obtain the required approvals for construction, we may face difficulties in managing or coordinating the construction process. If the construction is not finished by the time our lease expires, we may need to negotiate a new lease for our current or future premises, and may be unable to secure favorable terms, or may be required to agree to rent denominated in, or linked to, U.S. dollars, which would subject us to foreign exchange risk, or incur other significant expenses associated with the continuation and completion of construction.

Additional Risks Related to Regulatory Matters

Because the range of the services we provide is increasing and the legal framework governing the operations in our markets is evolving, we may be required to obtain additional licenses, permits or registrations or comply with other requirements, which may be costly or may limit our flexibility to run our business.

As we increase the range of services and diversify our business we may have to apply for additional licenses. Maintenance of granted licenses and obtaining new licenses may require us to spend additional resources. Licensing requirements may also limit our flexibility in running our business. Failure to maintain required licenses may significantly limit our ability to provide new services in respect of which these licenses are required.

As the legal framework in Russia continues to evolve, we may be required to take additional actions in order to comply with new legislation. Although we believe that we are in full compliance with applicable laws, ambiguities in legislation and the wide discretion granted to regulatory authorities may result in us being subject to additional regulatory requirements. Compliance with additional or new regulatory requirements, or new interpretations or applications of existing requirements, may also require us to spend additional resources and limit our flexibility in providing our services.

For instance, there are various discussions of regulation applicable to big data processing. Any restrictive regulations in this sphere might negatively affect our business operations and flexibility in providing our services.

We are subject to regulation regarding the processing and retention of personal and other data, which may impose additional obligations on us, limit our flexibility, or harm our reputation with users.

The collection and handling of user data by any entity or person in Russia (as in many other countries) may be subject to certain requirements and restrictions. If these requirements and restrictions are amended, interpreted or applied in a manner not consistent with current practice, we could face fines or orders requiring that we change our operating practices, which in turn could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Several companies in our group underwent a planned inspection by the competent Russian authority (Roskomnadzor) in 2019. The authority did not find any significant data protection violations. If further inspections are conducted in the future and result in the determination that companies in our group fail to comply with the applicable data protection legislation, we could experience financial and reputational losses and could be restricted from providing certain types of services until we comply with the requirements.

Furthermore, we use cookies and other widespread technologies that assist us in improving the user experience and personalization of our products and services that ultimately benefit both our users and advertisers through behavioral targeting, which makes our advertising more relevant. There is no clarity as to whether our practices are compliant with the requirements of applicable data protection legislation in Russia and abroad, and such laws could be interpreted and applied in a manner that is not consistent with our current data protection practices.

Additionally, “organizers of information distribution” (subjects that ensure the operation of information systems or computer software which are intended or used to receive, transmit, deliver and/or process electronic messages of internet users) are required to notify the relevant Russian authority about the commencement of their operations and must retain a broad range of data relating to and generated by their users for a period of time, which must be provided to the authorities at their request. Our principal subsidiary operating in Russia has notified the relevant Russian authority that it acts as an organizer of information distribution with respect to some of the services it provides. Organizers of information distribution that use encryption when delivering or processing electronic messages are required to provide

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the security authorities with information necessary for decoding the delivered or processed messages. Compliance with these requirements may require significant expenditures by us, including additional data centers, servers and other infrastructure or software development. Data retention may also harm our reputation with users. If we fail to comply with the above requirements, the Russian authorities can block access to our services in Russia.

Companies are also required to store all personal data of Russian users in databases located inside Russia. Ongoing compliance with the requirements provided in this legislation may be practically difficult, require significant efforts and resources, could lead to legal liability in other jurisdictions and limit functionality of our services. Compliance with these requirements may also limit our ability to compete with other companies located in other jurisdictions that do not require mandatory local storage of personal data related to their users and that may elect not to comply with such requirements in Russia.

Due to the nature of the services we offer and the fact that we have a presence in a number of countries, we may also be subject to data protection laws of other jurisdictions, especially laws regulating the cross-border transfer of personal data, which may require significant compliance efforts and could result in liability for violations in other jurisdictions. For example, the General Data Protection Regulation (the GDPR) came into force in May 2018 in the EU. Although we have only modest operations in the EU and therefore our exposure under the GDPR is generally limited, we believe that we are taking all necessary steps to comply with the GDPR. However, if we fail to interpret all the requirements of the GDPR in accordance with the official interpretation, we may be held liable for noncompliance. As our business grows, we may also encounter increased pressure from foreign state authorities with respect to the production of information related to users in circumvention of the international legal framework regulating the provision of such information. Any non-compliance with such requests may lead to liability and other adverse consequences. Further, current law imposes restrictions on the distribution of satellite images of certain areas in Russia and the other countries in which we operate and imposes requirements with respect to the information provided by the traffic monitoring service we offer. If we were found to be in violation of any such restrictions, we may be forced to suspend such services or may potentially be subject to fines or other penalties.

We may be subject to existing or new advertising legislation that could restrict the types and relevance of the ads we serve, which would result in a loss of advertisers and therefore a reduction in our revenues.

Russian law prohibits the sale and advertising of certain products and heavily regulates advertising with respect to certain products and services. Ads for certain products and services, such as financial services, as well as ads aimed at minors and some others, must comply with specific rules and must in certain cases contain required disclaimers.

Future amendments to legislation regulating advertising may impact our ability to provide some of our services or limit the type of advertising we may offer. The application of these laws to parties, such as Yandex, that merely serve or distribute ads and do not market or sell the product or service, however, can be unclear. Pursuant to our terms of service, we require that our advertisers have all required licenses or authorizations. If our advertisers do not comply with these requirements, and these laws were to be interpreted to apply to us, or if our ad-serving system failed to include necessary disclaimers (or otherwise ensure compliance of the ads with advertising legislation), we may be exposed to administrative fines or other sanctions, and may have to limit the types of advertisers we serve.

The regulatory framework in Russia governing the use of behavioral targeting in online advertising is unclear. If new legislation were to be adopted, or current legislation were to be interpreted, to restrict the use of behavioral targeting in online advertising, our ability to enhance the targeting of our advertising could be significantly limited, which could result in a loss of advertisers or a reduction in the relevance of the ads we serve, which would reduce the number of clicks on the ads and therefore our revenues.

Our need to comply with applicable Russian laws and regulations could hamper our ability to offer services that compete effectively with those of our foreign competitors and may adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Many of our global competitors, such as Google, have their principal operations outside of Russia, putting them generally outside of the jurisdiction of Russian courts and government agencies, even though some of them have offices in Russia. Our systems and operations are located principally in Russia; therefore, we closely monitor current practice in specific areas of law in the Russian regional and federal courts. There are a number of pending lawsuits against Yandex, the outcome of which could significantly affect the operation of certain of our services (e.g. toughen the liability of

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Yandex as information intermediary and provider of the online ads platform)

Russian laws and regulations that are applicable to us, but not to our non-Russian competitors, may impede our ability to develop and offer services that compete effectively on a global scale as well as in Russia with those offered by our non-Russia-based competitors and generally available worldwide over the internet. For instance, our non-Russian competitors might be not in compliance with the requirement of the Russian data protection legislation to store all personal data of Russian users in databases located inside Russia. In addition, our non-Russian competitors have not joined an anti-piracy memorandum signed between the major Russian IT companies and copyright holders. This memorandum stipulates an out-of-court procedure that obligates search engines to remove URLs that link to infringing audio-visual content at the request of the rights holders.

Any inability on our part to offer services that are competitive with those offered by our non-Russian competitors may adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

The competent authorities could determine that we hold a dominant position in one or more of our markets and could impose limitations on our operational flexibility that may adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Applicable antimonopoly legislation imposes restrictions on companies that occupy a dominant position in a given market. The competent authorities might from time to time investigate the internet or online advertising industries, the ride-hailing business or other sectors in which we operate, and may conclude that, given our market share, we hold a dominant position in one or more of these markets. Additionally, from time to time we receive information requests from the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) related to certain of our services. If the FAS deems that we hold a dominant position in one or more of the markets in which we operate, this could result in limitations on our future acquisitions and a requirement that we pre-approve with the authorities any changes to our standard agreements with advertisers and Yandex Advertising Network partners, as well as any specially negotiated agreements with business partners. In addition, if we were to decline to conclude a contract with a third party or terminate an existing agreement without sufficient substantiation this could, in certain circumstances, be regarded as an abuse of a dominant market position.

Any abuse of a dominant market position could lead to administrative penalties and the imposition of fines of up to 15% of our prior year annual revenues in the relevant market. These limitations may reduce our operational and commercial flexibility and responsiveness, which may adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

In February 2021, FAS notified Yandex that it has identified indications of the abuse of dominance in the way that Yandex presents enriched results in its search engine. FAS suggested that Yandex may be discriminating against third-party online services by presenting its own digital products in such enriched results. Despite the evidence provided that integration in various types of enriched results is available for third-party services and that Yandex has never refused to develop other types of integration with enriched results for rival services, FAS required that Yandex undertakes a number of measures to stop the alleged discrimination (including potentially the removal of enriched results that are not fully available for third parties). If Yandex fails to comply with these requirements, FAS may initiate an investigation, which could result in a fine of up to 15% of our prior year annual revenues in the relevant market (if FAS proves that we hold a dominant position and concludes that the violation occurred).In addition, Yandex may be obliged to comply with the above-mentioned requirements following any such investigation.

In addition, under Russian antimonopoly legislation some potential acquisitions that we may consider require a preliminary approval by FAS. FAS may withhold the approval or may approve transactions subject to particular conditions. Such conditions could place significant restrictions on Yandex businesses, could make the acquisition less attractive, and could result in a termination of the proposed transaction.

Risks Related to Tax Matters

Some of our counterparties provide limited transparency in their operations, which could subject us to greater scrutiny and potential claims from government authorities.

We do business with a number of companies, especially small companies that may not always operate in a fully

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transparent manner and that may engage in unpredictable or otherwise questionable practices with respect to tax obligations or compliance with other legal requirements. We have been approached by government authorities from time to time regarding potential tax claims or other compliance matters in connection with such transactions. As we are a larger and more transparent company with greater resources than such counterparties, governmental authorities may seek to collect taxes and/or penalties from us in relation to such transactions on the basis that we could have had knowledge of or aided such practices even when we did not.

Changes in the tax systems in the countries in which we operate, or unpredictable or unforeseen application of existing rules, may materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Russian tax, currency and customs laws and regulations are subject to varying interpretations and changes, which may be frequently revised and reviewed by the authorities. As a result, our interpretation of such tax legislation may be challenged by the relevant authorities. Russian tax legislation largely follows the OECD approach but may be implemented in a way which is not in line with international practice or our interpretation. Moreover, under the current conditions of weak economic growth and reduced tax revenue, the authorities are taking a more assertive position in their interpretation of the tax legislation and, as a result, it is possible that transactions and activities that have not been challenged in the past may now be questioned by the authorities. High-profile companies such as ours can be particularly vulnerable to such assertive positions of the authorities.

Although we believe that our interpretation of relevant legislation is appropriate and is in accordance with existing court practice, if the authorities were successful in enforcing differing interpretations, our tax liability may be greater than the estimated amount that we have expensed to date and paid or accrued on our balance sheet. We believe our tax position is consistent with the tax laws in the jurisdictions in which we conduct our business, however, the determination of our worldwide provision for tax liabilities, including digital tax, requires significant judgment and there are many transactions and calculations where the ultimate tax determination is uncertain and we are subject to regular review and audit by both domestic and foreign tax authorities. Generally, Russian taxpayers are subject to inspection of their activities for a period of three calendar years immediately preceding the year in which an audit is carried out, with tax audits routinely undertaken at least every two years. Tax years 2018, 2019 and 2020 are currently open for tax audit of our principal Russian subsidiaries.

There have also been significant developments and proposed changes in recent periods to international tax laws that increase the complexity, burden and cost of tax compliance. The OECD has published proposals covering a number of matters, including tax treaties and taxation of the digital economy. Future tax reform resulting from this development may result in changes to long-standing tax principles, which could adversely affect our effective tax rate or result in higher cash tax liabilities. To date, the OECD has failed to reach a consensus-based solution to address the challenges posed to the current tax system by the digitalization of the economy. Like other countries, Russia may consider the adoption of a “digital turnover” tax, which could materially increase our overall tax liability.

Taxes payable on dividends from our Russian operating subsidiaries to our parent company might not benefit from relief under the Netherlands-Russia tax treaty.

In prior years, our principal Russian operating subsidiary distributed dividends to our parent company (Yandex N.V.) and applied withholding tax at a 5% rate in reliance on the provisions of the Netherlands-Russia tax treaty.

Yandex N.V. is incorporated in the Netherlands and our principal operating subsidiaries are incorporated in Russia. Our management seeks to ensure that we conduct our affairs in such a manner that our parent company is regarded as the beneficial owner of all its incomes and not regarded as tax resident in any jurisdiction other than the Netherlands and, in particular, is not deemed to be a tax resident of, or to have a permanent establishment in, Russia. Thus, dividends paid from our Russian operating subsidiaries to our parent company should generally be subject to Russian withholding tax at a 5% rate. If our parent company were not treated as a Dutch resident for tax purposes or if it were deemed to have a permanent establishment in Russia, or if the Russian tax authorities were to determine that other conditions for the application of the 5% rate are not met because, for example, if Yandex N.V. is not deemed to be beneficial owner of the dividends received, dividends paid from our Russian operating subsidiaries to our parent company would be subject to Russian withholding tax at the rate of 15%.

We can provide no assurance that dividend withholding tax relief may not be challenged by the Russian tax

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authorities based on the grounds mentioned above. Furthermore, Russian tax rules regarding residency and beneficial ownership which were recently introduced may change or their interpretation may evolve, thus triggering changes in taxation of dividends from our Russian subsidiaries to our parent company in the future.

Based on the current state of the law and available interpretations, we believe that Yandex N.V. and our material foreign subsidiaries should not be treated as controlled foreign corporations for Russian tax purposes. However, there are risks that any of these rules may be interpreted or applied in a manner that may have an adverse effect on our results of operations.

In addition, in December 2020 Russia’s Finance Ministry announced that it was in the process of drafting a bill denouncing the double taxation treaty with the Netherlands, following reported failure to reach agreement on amendments to the treaty. If the Russian government proceeds with this plan in the first half of 2021, the treaty will cease to have effect from the beginning of 2022. In this case, our Russian subsidiaries would be subject to a 15% rate on dividends to our parent company and their unremitted earnings. This change would materially adversely affect our ability to upstream dividends to our parent company, and may require us to consider changes to the structure of our corporate group.

We may be required to record a significant deferred tax liability if we are unable to reinvest our earnings in Russia.

Our principal Russian operating subsidiary has significant accumulated earnings that have not been distributed to our Dutch parent company. Our current policy is to retain 50% of our earnings at the level of our principal subsidiary for investment in Russia.

As of December 31, 2020, we had an accrual of RUB 1,593 million ($21.6 million) for dividend withholding tax. If circumstances change and we are unable to reinvest in that subsidiary’s current operations or acquire suitable businesses in Russia, U.S. GAAP would require us to record a deferred tax liability representing the dividend withholding taxes that we would be required to pay if this subsidiary were to pay these unremitted accumulated earnings to our Dutch parent company as a dividend, even if such dividends were not actually declared and paid. As of December 31, 2020, the cumulative amount of unremitted earnings in respect of which dividend withholding taxes have not been provided is RUB 101,225 million ($1,370.2 million). The applicable withholding tax rate is 5% and the amount of the unrecognized deferred tax liability related to these unremitted earnings was RUB 5,061 million ($68.5 million) as of December 31, 2020. We expect the amount of unremitted earnings to grow as our principal Russian operating subsidiary continues to generate net income. If we were required to record a deferred tax liability on an amount subsequently made available for distribution it may have a material adverse effect on our results of operations and may require us to consider changes to the corporate structure of our group.

Risks Related to Ownership of our Class A Shares

The price of our Class A shares has been and may continue to be volatile. Market fluctuations specific to developing markets or to high-growth technology companies generally may affect the performance of our Class A shares and could expose us to potential securities litigation, which could result in substantial costs and a diversion of our management’s attention and resources.

Due to macroeconomic and geopolitical events, in 2020, IT companies global demonstrated significant growth, including companies with significant operations in Russia and certain other markets. Generally, the market for technology and other growth companies has generally experienced severe price and volume fluctuations that have often been disproportionate to the operating performance of those companies. These broad macroeconomic, geopolitical, market and industry factors may impact the market price of our Class A shares regardless of our actual operating performance.

The trading price of our Class A shares has been and may continue to be volatile and subject to wide fluctuations in price in response to various factors, some of which are beyond our control. These factors include:

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Additionally, volatility or a lack of positive performance in the price of our Class A shares may adversely affect our ability to retain key employees, some of whom have been granted equity awards.

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This volatility may affect the price at which holders of Class A shares may sell such shares and the sale of substantial amounts of our Class A shares could adversely affect our trading price.

In the past, following periods of volatility in the overall market and the market price of a company’s securities, securities class action litigation has often been instituted against these companies. Such litigation, if instituted against us, could result in substantial costs and a diversion of our management’s attention and resources.

The concentration of voting power with our principal shareholders, including our founders, directors, senior management and principal non-institutional shareholders, together with the Priority Share held by the Public Interest Foundation, limits your ability to influence corporate matters, while a loss of voting control by our principal shareholders could affect the direction of our company. 

Our Class B shares have ten votes per share and our Class A shares have one vote per share. As of February 15, 2021, our founder, directors, senior management (and their affiliates) and principal non-institutional shareholders together own 95.51% of our outstanding Class B shares and 3.63% of our outstanding Class A shares, representing in the aggregate 52.09% of the voting power of our outstanding shares. In particular, our founder, Mr. Volozh, directly or indirectly controls 86.22% of our outstanding Class B shares and 0.01% of our outstanding class A shares representing in the aggregate 45.48% of the voting power of our outstanding shares. Additionally, the Priority Share provides the Public Interest Foundation with certain rights, including an effective veto on acquisitions related to our Company or the sale of our material businesses.

In addition, as part of the restructuring that was approved in late 2019, the automatic conversion feature of the Class B Shares was amended to provide that, upon the death of a Class B holder, including Mr. Volozh, Class B Shares held by a family trust established by such holder will not automatically convert for a period of two years. During the two-year transition period following the death of Mr. Volozh, the trustee of the family trust will be bound to vote in favor of any proposal of the Board, and in accordance with the Board’s recommendation on any other matter. These restrictions will fall away, and the shares will automatically convert into Class A Shares, after the end of that two-year period.

As a result, our founder, directors, senior management and their affiliates have significant influence over the management and affairs of our company and over all matters requiring shareholder approval, including the election of directors, the amendment of our articles of association and significant corporate transactions, such as a sale of our company or its assets.

This concentrated control limits your ability to influence decisions on corporate matters. We may take actions that our public shareholders do not view as beneficial or as maximizing value for them. As a result, the market price of our Class A shares may be adversely affected.

Certain of our directors and shareholders and their affiliates may have interests that are different from, or in addition to, the interests of other Yandex shareholders.

Some of our directors are affiliated with investment funds or financial institutions that have investments in other businesses or entities that currently or may in the future compete with us or with whom we may enter into transactions. Such affiliations may require the directors to recuse themselves from consideration of certain transactions or may otherwise create real, potential or perceived conflicts of interest.

Our Board of Directors and our priority shareholder have the right to approve accumulations of stakes in our company or the sale of our principal Russian operating subsidiary, which may prevent or delay change-of-control transactions.

Our Board of Directors has the right to approve the accumulation by a party, group of related parties or parties acting in concert of the legal or beneficial ownership of shares representing 10% or more, in number or voting power, of our outstanding Class A and Class B shares (taken together). If our board grants its approval of such share accumulation, the matter is then submitted to Public Interest Foundation, as holder of our priority share, which has a further right of approval of such accumulation of shares. In addition, any decision by our Board of Directors to transfer all or substantially all of our assets to one or more third parties, including the sale of our principal Russian operating subsidiary, is subject to the prior approval of Public Interest Foundation, as priority shareholder.

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Any holding, transfer or acquisition by a party, group of related parties or parties acting in concert of the legal or beneficial ownership of Class B shares representing 10% or more, in number or by voting power, of our outstanding Class A and Class B shares (taken together), without the prior approval of our Board of Directors, first, and then the priority shareholder, will be null and void. The acquisition of shares in excess of the thresholds permitted by our articles of association will be subject to certain notification requirements set forth in our articles of association. Failure to comply with those terms would render the transfer of such shares null and void. In addition, the holders of such shares would not be entitled to the dividend or voting rights attached to their excess shares. The rights of our Board of Directors and our priority shareholder to approve accumulations of stakes in our company may prevent or delay change-of-control transactions.

Anti-takeover provisions in our articles of association may prevent or delay change-of-control transactions.

In addition to the rights of our board and of the priority shareholder to approve the accumulation of stakes of 10% or more, as described above, our multiple class share structure may discourage others from initiating any potential merger, takeover or other change-of-control transaction that our public shareholders may view as beneficial. Our articles of association also contain additional provisions that may have the effect of making a takeover of our company more difficult or less attractive, including:

The Dutch public offer rules, which impose substantive and procedural requirements in connection with the attempted takeover of a Dutch public company, only apply in the case of Dutch target companies that have shares listed on a regulated market within the European Union. We have not listed our shares, and do not expect to list our shares, on a regulated market within the European Union, and therefore these rules do not apply to any public offer for our Class A shares.

We rely on NASDAQ Stock Market rules that permit us to comply with applicable Dutch corporate governance practices, rather than the corresponding domestic U.S. corporate governance practices, and therefore your rights as a shareholder differ from the rights you would have as a shareholder of a domestic U.S. issuer.

As a foreign private issuer whose shares are listed on the NASDAQ Global Select Market, we are permitted in certain cases to follow Dutch corporate governance practices instead of the corresponding requirements of the NASDAQ Marketplace Rules. We follow Dutch corporate governance practices with regard to the quorum requirements applicable to meetings of shareholders and the provision of proxy statements for general meetings of shareholders. In accordance with Dutch law and generally accepted business practices, our articles of association do not provide quorum requirements generally applicable to general meetings of shareholders. Although we do provide shareholders with an agenda and other relevant documents for the general meeting of shareholders, Dutch law does not have a regulatory regime for the solicitation of proxies and the solicitation of proxies is not a generally accepted business practice in the Netherlands. Accordingly, our shareholders may not be afforded the same protection as provided under NASDAQ’s corporate governance rules.

We do not comply with all the provisions of the Dutch Corporate Governance Code. This may affect your rights as a

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shareholder.

As a Dutch company we are subject to the Dutch Corporate Governance Code, or DCGC. The DCGC contains both principles and best practice provisions for management boards, supervisory boards, shareholders and general meetings of shareholders, financial reporting, auditors, disclosure, compliance and enforcement standards. The DCGC applies to all Dutch companies listed on a government-recognized stock exchange, whether in the Netherlands or elsewhere, including the NASDAQ Global Select Market. The principles and best practice provisions apply to the board (in relation to role and composition, conflicts of interest and independence requirements, board committees and remuneration), shareholders and the general meeting of shareholders (for example, regarding anti-takeover protection and obligations of the company to provide information to its shareholders) and financial reporting (such as external auditor and internal audit requirements). The DCGC requires that companies either “comply or explain” any noncompliance and, in light of our compliance with NASDAQ requirements and as permitted by the DCGC, we have elected not to comply with all of the provisions of the DCGC. This may affect your rights as a shareholder and you may not have the same level of protection as a shareholder in a Dutch company that fully complies with the DCGC.

Because of the secondary listing of our Class A shares on the Moscow Stock Exchange, we are subject to additional disclosure and compliance requirements that may conflict with those imposed by the SEC and NASDAQ, and we may experience trade fluctuations based on arbitrage activities.

In June 2014, we established a secondary listing of our Class A shares on the Moscow Stock Exchange. Pursuant to that listing, we and our insiders must comply with certain disclosure and other obligations that may differ in timing and substance from those applicable to our NASDAQ listing. In addition, many of the obligations imposed by the Moscow Stock Exchange are formalistic in nature, and that exchange has limited experience in the application of its requirements to companies incorporated outside Russia. As a result, we may not be able to comply with all formal obligations in a manner that is consistent with the requirements or interpretations of that exchange.

In addition, this secondary listing may create opportunities for trading arbitrage, particularly in connection with currency fluctuations between the trading in U.S. dollars on NASDAQ and in rubles on the Moscow Stock Exchange, which could impact the trading price of our Class A shares.

Risks for U.S. Holders

We cannot assure you that we will not be classified as a passive foreign investment company for any taxable year, which may result in adverse U.S. federal income tax consequence to U.S. holders.

Based on certain management estimates with respect to our gross income and the average value of our gross assets and on the nature of our business, we believe that we were not a “passive foreign investment company,” or PFIC, for U.S. federal income tax purposes for the 2020 tax year, and do not expect to be a PFIC in the foreseeable future. However, because our PFIC status for any taxable year will depend on the composition of our income and assets and the value of our assets in such year, and because this is a factual determination made annually after the end of each taxable year and there are uncertainties in the application of the rules, there can be no assurance that we will not be considered a PFIC for the current taxable year or any future taxable year. In particular, the value of our assets may be determined in large part by reference to the market price of our Class A shares, which has fluctuated, and may continue to fluctuate, significantly. If we were to be treated as a PFIC for any taxable year during which a U.S. holder held our Class A shares, certain adverse U.S. federal income tax consequences could apply to the U.S. holder. See “Taxation—Taxation in the United States—Passive foreign investment company considerations.”

Any U.S. or other foreign judgments you may obtain against us may be difficult to enforce against us in Russia or the Netherlands.

We have only very limited operations in the United States, most of our assets are located in Russia, our company is incorporated in the Netherlands, and most of our directors and senior management are located outside the United States. As a result, it may be difficult to serve process on us or these persons within the United States. Although arbitration awards are generally enforceable in Russia and the Netherlands, and Russian courts may elect to enforce foreign court judgments as a matter of international reciprocity and judicial comity, you should note that judgments obtained in the United States or in other foreign courts, including those with respect to U.S. federal securities law claims, may not be enforceable in Russia or the Netherlands. There is no mutual recognition treaty between the United States

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and the Russian Federation or the Netherlands, and no Russian federal law or Dutch law provides for the recognition and enforcement of foreign court judgments. Therefore, it may be difficult to enforce any U.S. or other foreign court judgment obtained against our company, any of our operating subsidiaries or any of our directors in Russia or the Netherlands.

The rights and responsibilities of our shareholders are governed by Dutch law and differ in some important respects from the rights and responsibilities of shareholders under U.S. law.

Our corporate affairs are governed by our articles of association and by the laws governing companies incorporated in the Netherlands. The responsibilities of members of our Board of Directors under Dutch law are different than under the laws of some U.S. jurisdictions. In the performance of its duties, our Board of Directors is required by Dutch law to consider the interests of Yandex, its shareholders, its employees and other stakeholders and not only those of our shareholders. Also, as a Dutch company, we are not required to solicit proxies or prepare proxy statements for general meetings of shareholders.

In addition, the rights of our shareholders are governed by Dutch law and our articles of association and differ from the rights of shareholders under U.S. law. For example, Dutch law does not grant appraisal rights to a company’s shareholders who wish to challenge the consideration to be paid upon a merger or consolidation of the company.

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A few years ago, we embarked on a strategy to diversify our revenue streams and broaden the appeal of our ecosystem. Other revenue streams are growing rapidly and come from our Taxi segment, which includes our B2C and B2B ride-hailing, FoodTech, logistics and car-sharing services; Yandex.Market; Media Services and other initiatives related to IoT (Internet of Things); as well as Other Bets and Experiments. The contribution of non-advertising businesses have increased significantly. For the year 2020 the non-advertising segments accounted for 42% of our total group revenue compared with 31% in 2019 and 20% in 2018.

Our businesses are organized in the following operating segments:

Our Other Bets and Experiments segment consists of smaller business units and experiments that we aim to develop into thriving and successful businesses.

In February 2021, we have made changes to our organizational structure and created two core business groups: Search, Advertising and Cloud Services; and E-commerce and RideTech. Each of these business groups combines several segments and experiments, with similar business models, development mechanics and consumer problems they solve, under a single leader. The Search, Advertising and Cloud business group includes Search and Portal segment as well as smaller experiments such as Zen, Cloud, Geo and a few smaller services. The E-commerce and RideTech business group combines our key transactional services, including on-demand transportation, delivery and logistics services (i.e. Taxi segment) as well as Yandex.Market. Other businesses, such as Media Services, Classifieds, Self-Driving Group remain separate business units. The new structure aims to further improve coordination and integration between different services within the Yandex platform as well as to allow for more efficient realization of cross-segment synergies.

Search and Portal

We offer a broad range of world-class, locally relevant search and information services that are free to our users and that enable them to find relevant information quickly and easily.

Yandex Search

Our search engine offers almost instantaneous access to the vast range of information available online. We utilize linguistics, mathematics, machine learning and AI to develop proprietary algorithms that efficiently extract, compile, systematize and present relevant information to our users. Our organic search results are ranked by computer algorithms based exclusively on relevance, and we clearly segregate organic results from paid results to avoid confusing our users.

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According to Yandex.Radar, our total search share reached 59.2% of all search traffic in Russia in 2020, up from 56.3% in 2018 and 57.0% in 2019, which was driven by share growth on both desktop and mobile devices. In 2020, our search share on desktop and mobile reached 69.2% and 54.5%, respectively. We continued to gain share in mobile search, reaching 57.6% on Android and improving our share to 41.8% on iOS in 2020 (from 52.6% and 40.6% in 2019, respectively). In February 2021, our search share averaged 70.2% on desktop and 55.8% on mobile, respectively, with mobile search share of 59.3% on Android and 41.9% on iOS. Also, we further improved mobile monetization. The percentage of our total search traffic generated from mobile devices averaged approximately 60% in Q4 2020 compared with 58% in Q4 2019, while the percentage of our search revenues generated from mobile devices increased to approximately 53% in Q4 2020 from approximately 49% in Q4 2019.

In 2020, Yandex Search introduced YATI (Yet Another Transformer with Improvements) – a neural network based on the Transformer architecture, which allows us to evaluate semantic relationships between user queries and the content of web documents. Transformer architecture has several key advantages — it works not only with short texts, such as queries or article titles, but also with longreads. YATI is able to identify the most significant sections of a text and take those into account while delivering search results. YATI is also able to “understand” the relevant context, such as the sequence of words and how words affect each other. Overall, YATI is several million times more complex than our previous generation neural network and is one of the biggest updates to our core search technology in the last ten years.

Yandex Search App

Enhanced with Alice, the first conversational voice assistant on the Russian market, Yandex Search App integrates Yandex’s must-have services into one app, including Search, Maps, News, Zen, Weather and many others. At the beginning of 2021, our Search App was installed on 57% of Android smartphones in Russia and generated 56% of Yandex’ search traffic on the Android platform. The Yandex Search App audience reached 61 million users on Android on a monthly basis in February 2021.

Yandex Browser

Our Yandex Browser is the second most popular browser on desktops and the most popular non-native browser on mobile platforms in Russia. Yandex Browser is committed to delivering high-quality user experiences and to ensuring security for users online. Yandex Browser’s built-in Antishock technology blocks malicious and fraudulent advertising and its “Protect” technology offers comprehensive protection against the majority of online threats. For example, Yandex Browser checks all downloaded files for viruses, warns users about dangerous websites, encrypts users’ passwords with strong cryptography, and ensures safe payments. Also, the Russian version has native ad blocking to enhance users’ browsing experience by filtering intrusive advertising. In 2019, we started offering an energy-saving mode, making Yandex Browser the most energy-efficient browser, according to the tests of ixbt.com, the Russian information and analytical website focused on IT technologies. We have also created a set of free technologies for online stores that help increase the conversion rate of a website and simplify the user’s path to purchase. In early 2021 we have rolled out Your Tracking Protection (YTP), a feature that lets each individual user control whether to block or unblock third-party cookies through a simple, intuitive dashboard already built into the Yandex Browser. This is a further step to make browser experience safer and more secure.

The combined share of our desktop and mobile visits processed through Yandex Browser in Russia reached 21.6% in February 2021, according to Yandex.Radar.

Voice assistant Alice

In October 2017, we launched Alice, the first conversational intelligent assistant for the Russian market. Alice assists users with a broad range of inquiries, such as factoid questions, weather forecasts, directions and currency exchange rates, as well as helping users to manage daily tasks, such as setting up an alarm, reminding of important things or hailing a taxi. Alice is not limited to predefined scenarios and includes a general “chit-chat” mode – a unique feature among intelligent assistants that has been embraced by millions of users. It also benefits from the near-human level of speech recognition accuracy (based on the Word Error Rate measurement) provided by the Yandex SpeechKit platform. In May 2018, we launched a developers’ skills platform, Yandex.Dialogues, designed to make it easy for any third-party developer to create new skills for Alice. Today, there are about 4 million monthly users of external voice applications with Alice.

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In May 2019, we announced our own smart home ecosystem powered by Alice, and currently, the number of supported smart home device models is more than 8,000, including air-conditioners, robot vacuum cleaners, light switches, power sockets, remote controllers and more. While initially only accessible through our search app, Alice is now accessible through Yandex Browser, Yandex.Navigator, Yandex.Station, Yandex.Station Max, Yandex.Station Mini, Yandex.Auto and Yandex.TV, our smart TV platform based on AOSP (Android Open Source Project), as well as on third-party platforms and smart speakers.

In April 2020, we announced Yandex.TV, our own smart TV multimedia platform that comes pre-installed in a variety of budget and mid-range TVs offered in Russia based on the AOSP. Yandex.TV offers users seamless way of interacting with different kinds of content on one screen, including Yandex’s own KinoPoisk HD content, blogger videos and TV channels. Yandex.TV users can also stream videos from other streaming services such as ivi, MEGOGO and others. Since its launch, it has been integrated into more than 80 TV models by brands such as Hyundai, Leff, Hi, DEXP and others. In November 2020, voice assistant Alice was made available in all TVs with Yandex.TV on board: it can help navigate through content via smart voice search, find specific movies, answer general questions, tell the weather and much more.

Internet of Things (Yandex.Station)

In May 2018 we launched Yandex.Station, the first smart speaker designed for the Russian market and Yandex’s first hardware product, equipped with our AI voice assistant, Alice, to help users manage their daily tasks. Yandex.Station provides a complete in-home multimedia entertainment experience. As the first smart speaker with both audio and video capabilities, it plays music and also streams films, videos and television through its HDMI port to any connected display. Currently, Yandex.Station has access to our streaming services Yandex Music (audio) and KinoPoisk HD (video).

In 2019, we launched our next smart speaker – the compact and affordable Yandex.Station Mini, which has all the features of Yandex.Station apart from video capabilities. In addition, it features gesture control.

In November 2020, we presented a new addition to our family of smart speakers. The new Yandex.Station Max is the most powerful smart speaker produced by Yandex to date. It features advanced Dolby Audio technology for a perfect audio experience, 4K HDR for streaming films in crystal clear quality, and an interactive LED screen to visually augment Alice’s replies.

In February 2021 we have announced that sales of smart speakers with voice assistant Alice reached 1.3 million devices since inception.

Other Products and Services

Search and Portal segment includes number of other products and services, the key ones of which are the following:

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Our Monetization and Advertiser Services

We offer a variety of ad formats to our advertisers, including performance-based, brand and video advertising formats.

Performance-based ads are principally targeted to a particular user query on our search engine result pages, and on the search result pages of our partners, as well as to the content of a particular website or webpage being viewed, or to user behavior or characteristics. Such ads are clearly marked as paid advertising and are separate from our organic search results and non-advertising content.

Most of our revenues are generated from performance-based advertising, on a pay-per-click basis, with a smaller, but growing portion of revenues generated from brand advertising and video advertising, based on the number of impressions delivered. We actively monitor the ads we serve, both automatically and manually, in order to help ensure the relevance of the ads as well as compliance with applicable laws.

Yandex.Direct

Yandex.Direct is our auction-based advertising placement platform, which uses auction theory and relies on our distributed infrastructure to process millions of auctions every day. Yandex.Direct lets advertisers cost-effectively deliver relevant ads targeted at particular search queries or content on Yandex websites or third-party websites in the Yandex Advertising Network. Advertisers may use our automated tools, often with little or no assistance from us, to create performance-based ads, bid on keywords that are likely to trigger the display of their ads, and set total spending budgets. Yandex.Direct features an automated, online sign-up process that enables advertisers to create and quickly launch their advertising campaigns. Advertisers may also work with our sales staff to design and implement more specialized or sophisticated advertising campaigns. We also offer a Yandex.Direct mobile app to better facilitate advertisers’ access to our service to manage their advertising campaigns.

Performance-based ads on our desktop search engine results page (SERP) appear in one of several general categories: top of the page, appearing above the organic search results; and bottom of the page, which appears either below the organic search results or the right-hand block located to the right of the organic search results. Advertisers bid for the amount of traffic they want to purchase, instead of traditional bidding for a specific ad placement block. Yandex.Direct continues using a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auction to serve ads on our SERP.

We are constantly working to improve our automatic strategies, to make them better help businesses reach their goals. In the second quarter of 2020, we launched new a Fixed Cost Per Action (CPA) model in Yandex.Direct, as a result of which any business, regardless of size or industry, can pay a specific price for targeted user actions, like placing an order on the website or filling out a request. This strategy allows advertisers to spend their ad budgets more efficiently and receive better return on advertising spend. Moreover, this model allows us to attract new customers for whom the auction model was too complicated. This CPA model brought users more than 10 million targeted actions in the two quarters post launch.

For many businesses, phone calls are one of important metrics of ad campaigns effectiveness, as well as a channel of communication with customers. Therefore, we have started to test the implementation of a free of charge call tracking feature, which we will continue to develop in 2021.

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Yandex Advertising Network

Our Yandex Advertising Network partners include search websites, for which we provide search capabilities, as well as contextual network partners, where we serve ads on websites, based on user behavior or characteristics or website content. Among our partners are some of the largest Russian websites, including Avito, Mail.ru Group, Rambler, RIA and others.

We help third-party website owners monetize their content while extending the reach of our advertisers. Through the Yandex Advertising Network, our partners can deliver performance-based ads on their search results pages or websites. Our advertising algorithms use our proprietary MatrixNet technology, which optimizes the click-through rate on our network through improved click prediction. We screen applicants for the Yandex Advertising Network and favor websites with high-quality content and stable audiences to offer advertisers high-quality traffic.

Yandex’s video advertising network allows users to place full-screen videos, video ads on pages of websites and ads within the video content available on over 450 advertising platforms, including desktop and mobile websites, mobile apps and Smart TV applications. Yandex’s video ad network covers over 67 million users. Yandex’s technologies enable users to provide advertising to the targeted audience and offer analysis of its efficiency through different tools and instruments, such as Brand Lift or video roll analysis.

In 2020 we completed the acquisition of K50, an efficient and fully automated platform for centralized ad placement in different channels, and one of the leading ad solutions for ad agencies on the Russian market.

Programmatic advertising

We have developed a range of programmatic advertising products, which utilize real-time bidding, or RTB, technologies to provide effective solutions to our publisher and advertiser partners. Our RTB ad exchange connects our performance-based demand-side platform (DSP) Yandex.Direct, to our display-based DSP (called AWAPS) as well as to integrated third-party DSPs. Our RTB ad exchange leverages the wealth of targeting data generated by our own Data Management Platform, including Crypta, and search and browsing history. The RTB ad exchange is connected to many of our Yandex Advertising Network partners who have chosen to display ads from our RTB ad exchange as well as or in lieu of our regular Yandex.Direct ads. In addition, through ADFOX, an online ad management platform for media publishers, we provide a supply-side platform to our publisher partners. ADFOX is able to mediate in real-time between programmatic brand ads from AWAPS, performance-based ads from Yandex.Direct, ads from integrated third-party DSPs and the publisher’s own direct sales. In 2020 we introduced Outstream video ads, a mobile-specific video ads that reach potential customers on partner site, along with contextual and display ads in the same RTB block. This format helps website owners to use their ad inventory more efficiently.

Mobile Advertising

We offer our advertisers the ability to display ads on mobile versions of Yandex services, including Search, Zen, and our Advertising Network partner websites, as well as in mobile applications, including our Yandex Search App. Advertisers are able to set up their mobile bids as a coefficient of their desktop bids.

Turbo pages

Launched in mid-2017, Turbo pages is a format of displaying content on mobile devices that loads several times faster than regular web pages and is optimized for smaller screens. Our Turbo pages are easier to implement compared to other similar products and offer monetization from Yandex out of the box. Turbo pages are available on Search, Zen and News, in mobile and desktop. In 2020, our Turbo-pages were being used by tens of thousands of internet websites.

Analytics tools

Our web analytics system, Yandex.Metrica, has the largest coverage among web analytics platforms in Russia. It is installed on 89% of all “.ru” domains using at least one web analytics tag. It is also one of the three most popular web analytics tools in the world. Yandex.Metrica combines near real-time reporting tools with intuitive heat maps and session replay. It features online-to-offline and cross-device tracking, easy-to-use attribution models, intuitive

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dashboards and fully customizable reports and segments. Yandex.Metrica offers a comprehensive set of tools for ad analytics, helping businesses easily find traffic sources with the highest ROI. Yandex.Metrica provides the Logs API to export all raw data in order to accomplish complex tasks. Yandex.Metrica is available without any data caps, regardless of the traffic volume.

We also provide users with AppMetrica, a universal app analytics and marketing platform for install attribution that can be used for tracking various kinds of ad campaigns, as well as for product analytics, crash reports and push campaigns.

Yandex.Radar is our analytics tool, which provides statistics on search market shares and browser usage, as well as traffic breakdown by operating system and device type.

Taxi

Our taxi segment provide a multi-mode experience that seamlessly and efficiently satisfies the needs of users and business for ride-hailing, car-sharing and delivery (including food and grocery delivery). Our platform enables access to a wide range of personal mobility and delivery services through our Yandex Go super app, which we launched in August 2020 and which combines ride-hailing, logistics, car-sharing, and public transport schedules, as well as food and grocery delivery services, in one app. Our users can also access this collection of services through standalone apps, including Uber Russia ride-hailing app, Yandex.Drive car-sharing app, as well as Yandex.Eats and Yandex.Lavka.

Ride-Hailing

We launched our ride-hailing service in Russia in 2011. As of December 31, 2020, our ride-hailing services are available in 17 countries, including Russia, and approximately 800 cities (with over 50,000 population). The scale of our network coupled with our proprietary technology and marketplace efficiency enable us to accurately forecast demand and incentivize drivers to be available to accept rides, providing highly reliable ride-hailing services for individual users and businesses.

We have established one of the largest ride-hailing networks in Russia and much of the CIS, providing over 900,000 drivers with taxi orders and enabling riders to complete over 1.6 billion rides across all our geographies in 2020. Our total number of rides grew 18% year-over-year in 2020, despite the pandemic-related slow-down during the first half of the year.

Russia has historically accounted for a large portion of our ride-hailing operations, where we offer the broadest range of ride-hailing tariffs, varying by both price and functionality.

In addition to our primary ride-hailing services, our B2B platform offers comprehensive solutions for corporate ride-hailing services, including business trips, airport transfers and staff logistics, as well as transportation budget management. We launched our B2B platform in Russia in 2016 and have since expanded it to include Kazakhstan, Armenia, Belarus and Israel.

Our app utilizes smartphone GPS to detect a rider’s location and efficiently connect a rider with an available driver. Our app also provides robust features and functionality for riders throughout a trip, including the efficient determination of pickup points to reduce estimated arrival and waiting times. Our proprietary map infrastructure allows our apps to more precisely locate cars, as well as offer a more accurate match with nearby drivers. Our app provides riders with upfront pricing and may also suggest alternative pickup points with a shorter wait time or lower fare. At locations with more complicated logistics such as airports or stadiums, pickup points are predetermined in our app and are integrated with offline signage. Our app accepts a variety of payment methods, including credit cards, cash paid directly to the driver in certain markets and e-wallet payment solutions (including Apple Pay, Google Pay and others).

We currently build relationships with our drivers for our ride-hailing services both directly and through a wide partner network (Fleet Management Companies or FMCs). In certain Russian regions, we also support the new simplified self-employment regime that has been introduced by the tax authorities in Russia, which allows us to engage more drivers directly.

We offer our FMC partners access to efficient fleet management software to manage their driver base and fleet, optimizing their administrative and technical workflows.

Safety is of the utmost importance, and we take a comprehensive approach to monitoring and improving the safety of all our platform users, before, during and after their rides. We offer insurance that covers passengers, drivers

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and third party participants in the event of personal injuries sustained in a ride. We have also implemented service access controls, such as driver scoring and detailed driver identification methods. We also tailor certain safety features to particular users, such as providing child safety seats. For drivers, we offer training and vehicle check-ups, both remotely and in person, and we continue piloting various technological tools to improve trip safety, such as video and telemetry monitoring to ensure drivers are alert, while our support service provides emergency support and a safety center services right within the app for both riders and drivers.

During COVID-19 pandemic, we created a separate fleet of vehicles drawn from the hundreds of thousands of cars available through the Yandex.Taxi service and organized more than 160 points for taxi cars disinfection throughout Russia, where drivers also received personal protective equipment. We also established a Support Fund for our drivers and couriers who were infected with COVID-19, in order to support them and their families during the period they were not able to perform ride-hailing services.

FoodTech

Our FoodTech business consists of Yandex.Eats, our ready-to-eat and grocery delivery services, and Yandex.Lavka, a hyperlocal convenience store delivery service. We see a large potential for both segments in our target markets.

Our FoodTech business relies on a wide partner network of couriers, who make deliveries on cars, bikes, scooters and on foot.

As of December 31, 2020, our Yandex.Eats services was available in 170 cities in Russia and Kazakhstan, with the majority of operations in Russia. Yandex.Eats is one of the leading online food ordering and delivery marketplaces in Russia working with approximately 33,000 restaurants as of the end of December 2020. In 2020, in addition to food delivery services, we started to provide grocery delivery from third party retail stores. As of the end of 2020, we partnered with over 20 retail chains across Russia. Approximately 85% of our orders in 2020 were through a first-party delivery model.

Yandex.Lavka offers on-demand delivery of groceries, ready-to-eat and other FMCG products within 10 to 30 minutes. The assortment includes over 2,500 SKUs with a focus on fresh and ready-to-eat categories. As of the end of December 2020 Yandex.Lavka operated 270 “dark” stores (mini warehouses) across Russia and Israel.

Logistics

Yandex Logistics is our delivery solution for consumers and businesses, which we launched during the pandemic as a mean to serve the increased demand for delivery services. The service leverages Yandex’s routing and mapping platform to provide on-demand B2C and B2B delivery services.

Our logistics services are available to users in the Yandex Go super app, while for businesses we developed proprietary software, tailored for specific needs of SMBs and large enterprises.

In 2020 the service grew rapidly, and its annualized run-rate reached 55 million deliveries in December 2020. The number of businesses actively using our Logistics services in December exceeded 15,000. We provide logistics services for internal Yandex businesses, such as Market, Eats and Lavka, as well as for third party companies, such as Detsky Mir, VkusVill, L’Etoile, Pandora, Ozon, Avito, Beeline, Tele2, MTS, 1C, VTB, various food retailers and pharmacies.

The service is currently available in over 350 cities in 12 countries.

Yandex.Drive

In February 2018, we launched our free-floating car-sharing service, Yandex.Drive, providing users with vehicles that can be reserved for a different period of time through a standalone mobile app, as well as through Yandex Go, and which can be dropped off in any permitted parking place across the cities we serve, as well as at airports and shopping malls. Offering on-demand access to cars in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Kazan and Sochi, Yandex.Drive operates the leading car-sharing platform in Russia.

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Yandex.Drive has been working with corporate clients since 2019. In 2020, Yandex.Drive launched a car subscription service, which allows a user to rent a car by subscription for a period of one month to one-and-a-half years through the app and includes maintenance and insurance.

We equip Yandex.Drive’s car fleet with our own proprietary telematics system and Yandex.Auto, our in-car infotainment system. Yandex.Auto provides a number of Yandex’s services, including Yandex.Navigator and Yandex Music. Powered by our voice-controlled assistant Alice, Yandex.Auto allows the user to personalize the service. It recognizes each user, greeting them by name, loads their usual routes, plays their favorite music and warns about traffic or weather conditions.

Yandex.Drive pricing is inclusive of fuel, parking, insurance and other costs associated with car ownership. Yandex provides dynamic pricing, which integrates traffic conditions, customer demand and other factors at the time of reservation. In addition, Yandex.Drive became the first car-sharing service worldwide to launch a fixed-price tariffs based on the final destination point, which allows us to improve the utilization rates of our fleet.

In September 2020, Yandex contributed the Yandex.Drive car-sharing business from Yandex N.V. to MLU B.V, our joint venture with Uber.

Yandex.Market

Yandex.Market is one of the most popular internet services in Russia, working as a multi-category marketplace and price comparison service. We aggregate price, product and availability information from thousands of active online and “brick and mortar” retailers. The marketplace is priced on cost per action (CPA) model, while price comparison is mainly priced on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis and recognizes revenue only when a user clicks on product offerings placed by merchants on Yandex.Market.

Yandex.Market price comparison service was launched in 2000, while the transformation into an e-commerce platform began in 2018 when Yandex and Sberbank of Russia completed the formation of a joint venture to develop a multi-category marketplace in addition to comparison shopping. In 2020, we reorganized our Yandex.Market joint venture by acquiring all of the Sberbank’s stake in the JV (45%). As a result of this transaction, Yandex became a controlling shareholder of Yandex.Market. We believe that the Russian e-commerce market is in the early stages of development and has significant long-term growth potential underpinned by an accelerating shift from offline to online in the retail sector. Full operational control over Yandex.Market allows us to capitalize on these secular trends as well as to unlock significant synergies from the deeper integration of Yandex.Market with other services within our platform.

In October 2020 we combined our price comparison and marketplace businesses into one platform under the Yandex.Market brand. This unified platform enables us to provide the full suite of e-commerce services to over 30,000 partners, including access to consumers, fulfillment, logistics, advertising and marketing, payments, support and analytics. This platform is also a one-stop shop for online buyers. As a part of our integration efforts, we launched an on-demand delivery option, capitalizing on the synergies between Yandex.Market and the courier capabilities of Yandex.Lavka. This service offers 15-30 minute “delivery to the door” and is now available to all users in Moscow, parts of St Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod. We have also expanded our loyalty program Yandex Plus to our marketplace, so users are now able to receive up to 5% cashback as well as to pay for their purchases with Yandex Plus points. In 2021, in addition to cashbacks, we added free delivery for orders over 699 Rubles for Yandex Plus subscribers. In the current year, we will focus on accelerating growth, transitioning merchants from the CPC to CPA model and expanding our logistics infrastructure.

During 2020 we materially expanded our third-party business (3P) from 34% of the marketplace’s gross merchandise value (GMV) in the fourth quarter of 2019 to 63.5% in the fourth quarter of 2020 (66% in December 2020). More than half of our third-party GMV is fulfilled by Yandex.Market.

Our combined e-commerce GMV, which includes Yandex.Market marketplace GMV, the GMV of Yandex.Lavka and GMV of deliveries from grocery stores on Yandex.Eats grew threefold in 2020 and reached 56 billion rubles (on a pro-forma basis, including Yandex.Market for the full year 2020). In addition to that, our Yandex.Market price comparison platform generated approximately 220 billion rubles of GMV in the full year 2020.

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The assortment on Yandex.Market marketplace expanded more than threefold during 2020 and reached 2 million SKUs by the end of the year. The number of buyers increased more than twofold and averaged over 6 million in December 2020. The number of sellers on the marketplace reached 8,000 in early 2021.

By the end of 2020, Yandex.Market operated four fulfillment centers (three in Moscow and one in Rostov on Don) with total area of over 100,000 square meters. In addition, our logistics infrastructure included 8 sorting centers, 632 pick-up points (including 108 branded) and 1,187 branded lockers. In November 2019, we launched a managed courier platform in Moscow, which we further expanded to several other cities including Saint Petersburg, Rostov on Don, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, and Krasnodar. Courier delivery remains the primary last-mile delivery option and accounted for 58% of all orders at the end of 2020, including 32% of all orders delivered via our own managed courier platform. The development of our managed courier platform has helped to improve delivery speed compared to third party logistics providers. Around 95% of deliveries via our managed platform were delivered in the customer’s preferred time slot. In November 2020, we began testing our “dropshipping by seller” (DSBS) model, whereby the marketplace is only responsible for customer engagement, while the merchandise moves directly from a merchant to a customer without being handled, stored or delivered by us. The model is gaining traction with merchants and should help us to expand the number of merchant partners as well as widen the assortment on our marketplace.

Media Services

Media Services include our entertainment services (Yandex Music, KinoPoisk HD, Yandex.Afisha and Yandex.TV Program), our subscription service Yandex Plus as well as our production center Yandex.Studio. Based on Yandex’s recommendation technologies and professional content, Media Services offer its users various entertainment options. We monetize Media Services through subscription revenue, online advertising and transaction revenues, as well as event tickets sales. Our Media Services are available across different platforms, including Yandex.Station and Yandex.Auto.

Media Services include the following:

We are pleased that several key benefits of Yandex Plus are already materializing. We see improved conversion from trials to paid subscribers, better cross-service usage and higher average spend. Furthermore, we expect that other advantages of our subscription model such as higher customer retention and lower customer acquisition costs will come to bear soon.

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Classifieds

Yandex’s Classifieds business unit includes Auto.ru, Yandex.Realty, Yandex.Jobs and Yandex Classifieds.

Auto.ru is our classifieds platform for used and new cars, motorcycles, commercial vehicles and spare parts. We strive to make the used cars market as transparent as possible by providing comprehensive information about the cars advertised on our platform. Auto.ru puts significant effort into providing users with the special tools such as vehicle history reports, which include information from dozens of sources (carmakers, service stations, distributors, official databases and so on). In 2019, we launched a new feature that allows our users to apply for a car loan directly on the Auto.ru website. We partner with reputable financial organizations and do not issue the loans ourselves.

Auto.ru continues to hold a leading position in its established markets with particularly strong presence in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Ekaterinburg. We also continue growing our market share in the regions. Successful integration of Hearst Shkulev Media, the largest media company in the Urals with 30 auto classifieds domains in the regions, and our deal with 24auto.ru, the leading auto classified in Krasnoyarsk region, have also strengthened our regional businesses.

We monetize Auto.ru through vehicle history reports, loan commissions, value added services (VAS), listing fees and valid calls from clients for dealers, spare part sellers and certain individuals as well as through advertising.

Yandex.Realty is our real estate classifieds platform for private individuals, developers and realtors. The service provides listings for both sales and rentals of apartments, houses and commercial property. We also offer the

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opportunity to place listings for apartments in newly-built or under-construction apartment complexes across Russia. Yandex.Realty helps users not only to find the right listing but also discover all relevant information about the building and its surroundings. Yandex.Realty primarily generates revenues from listings of new apartments, charging realtors for verified calls from clients.

Yandex.Jobs is our service for job seekers, which is mainly focused on blue collar and service industry jobs. The service is available on the desktop and as a mobile app for Android and iOS and allows users to get in touch with a potential employer directly from the app. Yandex.Jobs aggregates vacancies from a number of partners.

Yandex Classifieds is a platform for free online classified advertisements of general goods, which we have launched in December 2020.

Other Bets and Experiments

We are constantly working to expand our portfolio to ensure growth and development in the future. Other Bets and Experiments segment includes new initiatives and smaller business that are being tested and developed.

Zen

Yandex Zen is a social infotainment platform that brings together content creators and users. The service features an AI powered personalized content feed based on user interests. For content creators, the platform offers monetization opportunities as well as provides instruments to produce high quality content in multiple formats and engage with the audience. The number of daily average users reached 20.3 million in December 2020 (up 51% from December 2019), who generally spend over 40 minutes per day on the platform.

Yandex Zen has been successfully developing its own content platform since 2017, when the service launched a partner program with content creators. It helped to increase the share of high-quality content available on the platform and became one of the key drivers of growing user engagement for Yandex Zen. Currently 80% of the user’s time on Zen relates to our own platform and most of our content is unique and created exclusively for Yandex Zen.

While initially Yandex Zen was a text-based content platform, it now offers multiple formats, including short videos, live broadcasts and galleries. Most of these new formats were added during 2020, which contributed to the rapid growth of video consumption on Yandex Zen. As of February 2021 23% of user time is spent consuming video content compared to only 5% in January 2020.

Yandex Zen is available to users on Yandex Home Page, in Yandex Browser, Opera desktop browser in Russia, Turkey and Indonesia, and as a standalone app on Android and iOS. In addition, we integrated Zen as the main feed in the Yandex Search app on Android and iOS. Zen is also the default content feed in the Samsung Internet browser in Russia, Belarus and Turkey. Moreover, Zen is preinstalled on some third-party devices sold in Russia by vendors such as Huawei, Honor, Xiaomi, Samsung, Alcatel, as well as some other local brands. In 2019, the Yandex Zen recommendation service was launched inside Viber Messenger, the second most popular messaging app among traditional messengers in Russia, and later Viber expanded the Yandex Zen experience to Belarus and Vietnam.

Yandex.Cloud

Yandex.Cloud is a full-fledged cloud platform that provides B2B customers (SMBs and enterprises) (which account for 90% of our revenue) and individual developers with scalable infrastructure, storage, machine learning and development tools to build and enhance cutting-edge digital services and applications.

Since the launch in September 2018, Yandex.Cloud has seen a rapid growth both in terms of revenue and new customers with number of active users reaching 15,000 by the end of December 2020, driven by increasing demand of Russian and international companies for cloud services for creating and developing their own digital products and industry platforms, working with data, and upgrading IT infrastructure. In 2020, we added 8 new services to the platform, including services in the field of security, serverless computing and machine learning. The Yandex.Cloud platform has become the first public cloud platform in Russia and the CIS that complies with both international standards such as ISO 27017 and ISO 27018, and Russian regulation in terms of data storage and processing. All Yandex.Cloud services are available on servers located in Russia.

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Yandex.Cloud became an independent business unit in 2020.

Self-Driving Group

In early 2017, we started working on our driverless technologies with the aim of creating a fully autonomous system that can operate various types of vehicles and be applied to various transportation scenarios (including, among others, ride-hailing, logistics, e-commerce, food and grocery delivery) in a wide range of conditions. In May 2017, we unveiled the first prototype of our self-driving car, which leverages Yandex’s world-class technologies, and launched public road testing by the end of the year.

In November 2018, we received a license to operate our self-driving car in the state of Nevada and demonstrated the advanced capabilities of our autonomous vehicles at CES, Las Vegas in January 2019 and again in 2020. In December 2018, we obtained the relevant permission from the Israeli Ministry of Transportation and Road Safety, and began regular tests of our self-driving cars on public roads in Tel Aviv, Israel. Yandex is also operating Europe’s first autonomous ride-hailing service with no one behind the steering wheel in Innopolis, Russia.

By the end of 2020, our self-driving fleet had grown to over 160 cars, which have accumulated over 6 million autonomous miles on public roads in Russia, United States and Israel.

In 2019, Yandex signed an MOU with Hyundai Mobis to jointly develop autonomous vehicles and introduced the fourth generation of Yandex autonomous vehicles based on the Hyundai Sonata in June 2020. We are also developing our own proprietary LIDAR sensors to be used in our self-driving cars. We have already started testing the prototypes of our solid state 360-degree LIDARs on the streets of Moscow.

In November 2019, we introduced our autonomous delivery robot, Yandex.Rover, which leverages our self-driving technology. In 2020, Rovers started commercial operations in three Russian locations - Moscow, Innopolis and Skolkovo, delivering orders from our ready-to-eat delivery service Yandex.Eats and groceries from our hyperlocal grocery delivery service Yandex.Lavka. The number of delivered orders since we launched the service reached more than 2,000 in February 2021.

In September 2020, Yandex and Uber completed the spin-off of the self-driving vehicles business, Yandex SDG, from their Ride-Hailing and FoodTech joint venture. As a result of the restructuring, Yandex SDG is directly owned by Yandex (72.8%) and Uber (18.6%), with the remaining shares reserved for Yandex SDG management and employees.

Geolocation Services

Our Geolocation Services integrate Yandex’s advanced technologies (including mapping, cartography, and navigation) to provide a broad range of services across Russia, other CIS countries and Turkey. We focus on the development of logistics and routing solutions for individual users and businesses, as well as advertising products for offline businesses. Our Geolocation Services include Yandex.Maps, Yandex.Navigator, our infotainment system for connected cars, Yandex.Auto, our contactless payment service at gas stations, Yandex.Fuel, as well as Yandex.Routing, our technology platform for businesses, which provide services and products in the transportation and logistics industries. We monetize Geolocation Services through online advertising, licensing and transaction services.

Yandex.Maps provide high-quality, detailed maps of Russia, its neighboring countries, Turkey and other countries where we operate our ride-hailing service. The monthly audience of the service has reached 50 million users across all platforms and 20 million monthly average users in the mobile app in 2020. We offer our users panoramic views, navigation across cities enriched with augmented reality, public transportation routes, driving directions with voice controls and turn-by-turn navigation. We continue to develop Yandex.Maps to integrate new features, such as hotel bookings, food ordering, ratings and reviews of restaurants as well as their menus. We recently integrated a Transportation section, which enables users to see public transport routes as well as the movement of buses, trolleybuses and trams in real time. In 2020, we launched a full-fledged navigation service for drivers in Yandex.Maps, which frees users from switching to Yandex.Navigator for turn-by-turn navigation.

We use our technology and licenses to create and edit maps from raw data, including satellite images, GPS coordinates and live user feedback. Yandex.Maps is also available via application programming interfaces, or APIs,

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which allow developers to embed and use our interactive maps in third-party websites and applications, as well as to add extra layers of information — for example, to offer a map showing the location of a restaurant or a hotel.

We also offer Yandex.Navigator, which integrates our AI assistant Alice. Yandex.Navigator provides turn-by-turn navigation, incorporates a voice input function, speed limit warnings, parking information and information about accidents or road works. It is one of Yandex’s most popular mobile apps in terms of usage.

Our map-based apps allow offline businesses to place ads in native formats (adopted for different scenarios on the map), offering then advanced targeting capabilities.

Yandex.Auto is our voice-activated in-car infotainment system, which offers Yandex’s best-in-class mapping and navigation, music streaming, weather information and other services. We work with car manufacturers to equip cars with Yandex.Auto. Yandex.Auto is already available in some models of Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Renault, Geely, Chery and others on the Russian market. In this segment, we primarily generate revenues from the sale of Yandex.Auto software licenses.

Yandex.Fuel is a contactless payment service at gas stations built into Yandex.Navigator, Yandex.Maps, Taximeter, an app for Yandex.Taxi drivers, Yandex.Drive and a standalone Yandex.Fuel app, and is also available to corporate clients. The service was launched in December 2018.

Currently, more than 7,000 fueling stations are connected to the service throughout Russia, including EKA, Neftmagistral, gas station Tatneft, Shell and others. In 2020 Rosneft, Russia’s biggest oil company, including brands such as Rosneft, BP, Bashneft, PTK and TNK, was connected to Yandex.Fuel. In 2020, users of Yandex.Fuel purchased more than 547 million liters of fuel with a gross merchandise value of 21.9 billion rubles.

In 2020, we launched a feature, whereby drivers can order food and coffee from a gas station store through the app and have it delivered to their car. This function is currently available at 150 gas stations in Moscow and the Moscow region and we plan further expansion in 2021.

Yandex.Routing is our B2B routing platform based on Yandex.Maps, aimed at providing businesses in the transportation and logistics segments with route optimization solutions that incorporate current traffic conditions. More than 20,000 commercial vehicles use Yandex.Routing platform every day. Among the clients are large retail and FMCG companies. Routing technologies are also used by Yandex own services such as Yandex.Eats, Yandex.Lavka and Yandex.Market.

Yandex.Business is a service for small and medium-sized businesses that bundles together ad tools, allowing ad placement more efficient and simpler without special knowledge. We already have a simple subscription service tailored primarily to offline businesses so they can efficiently advertise online in Search, Zen, Yandex.Maps, Ad Network and other properties for a fixed monthly fee. We have seen a great interest to this product with the number of clients in December growing 16% compared to September and 81% year-over-year. We plan to expand the usage of this product to all SMEs to automate and optimize their business processes and digital advertising.

Our Technology

Yandex is a technology company that is a pioneer in machine learning, artificial intelligence and neural networks. We believe this expertise uniquely positions us in the global technology arena and allows us to innovate in our local markets and continuously improve our products and services based on complex, unique technologies that are not easily replicated.

Advertisers

Our advertisers include individuals and small, medium and large businesses throughout the countries in which we operate, as well as large multinationals. Small and medium size enterprises drive the majority of our advertising revenue. No single advertiser accounted for more than 1.1% of our total revenues in 2018, 2019 or 2020.

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Sales and Advertiser Support

We have an extensive sales and support infrastructure, with sales offices in a number of cities in Russia, as well as Minsk, Belarus; Lucerne, Switzerland; Newburyport, Massachusetts, USA; Shanghai, China; Tel Aviv, Israel and Almaty, Kazakhstan. In Russia we have 16 regional sales offices.

The substantial majority of our advertisers use our automated Yandex.Direct service to establish accounts, create ads and manage their advertising campaigns. Our largest advertising clients are served by a dedicated sales team. These advertisers have access to our strategic support services, including a dedicated accounts team, to help them set up and manage their campaigns. Our sales team specialists are able to help advertisers with tasks such as selecting relevant keywords, creating effective ads and audience targeting, and measuring and improving advertisers’ return on investment.

The Yandex Advertising Network follows a similar model. Most of the websites in the network submit their applications through Yandex.Direct’s automated partner interface. Our direct sales force focuses on building relationships with our largest partners to help them get the most out of their relationship with us. We also have relationships with different advertising sales agencies placing online advertising.

Marketing

We engage in significant marketing efforts directed first and foremost at internet users, as well as advertising agencies, advertisers and webmasters. Our marketing efforts are focused above all on delivering an optimal user experience with every Yandex product and service. We believe that satisfied users are the best and most credible advocates for our services. In order to improve user satisfaction and loyalty and to continue to use our products and services as marketing tools, we constantly experiment with and improve the design, technology and interface of these products and services. Although we believe that word of mouth is the best advertising strategy, we also view advertising campaigns in online and traditional media as an important element of our efforts to promote our brand. We also invest heavily into our separate business units, including Taxi, Yandex.Market, Media Services, Classifieds, and Other Bets and Experiments including Zen, Cloud and Geolocation Services to grow customer awareness, increase user base, increase usage in our existing markets and penetrate into other geographies.

Competition

We operate in a market characterized by rapid commercial and technological change, and we face significant competition in many aspects of our business, including search, ride-hailing, food delivery, classifieds, media services, e-commerce and cloud. We currently operate principally in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkey.

Across our different business lines we face competition from both global (such as Google, Facebook) and local players (Mail.ru, Sberbank).

We consider Google to be our primary competitor. In addition to its search solutions, including voice search, Google offers online advertising, information and other search services similar to ours, including services similar to Yandex.Direct. We expect that Google will continue to use its brand recognition, financial and engineering resources to compete with us.

The following table presents a comparison of Russian search market share, according to Yandex.Radar (a search traffic and browser usage analytics tool based on Yandex.Metrica data), based on search traffic generated:

Mail.ru Group is one of our largest local competitors. Mail.ru offers many communication services, including Russia’s most popular webmail, social networking and messenger services. Our Yandex.Direct platform competes for advertising budgets with myTarget, an advertising tool operated by Mail.ru across its social networks and e-commerce

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projects.

We believe that social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Mail.ru Group’s Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki and My World services as well as video platforms such as YouTube, are becoming significant competitors for online ad budgets. These sites derive a growing portion of their revenues from online advertising, and are experimenting with innovative ways of monetizing user traffic. In light of their very large audiences and the significant amount of proprietary information they can access to analyze their users’ needs, interests and habits, we believe that they may be able to offer highly targeted advertising which could create increased competition for us. The popularity of such sites may also reflect a growing shift in the way in which people find information, get answers and buy products, which may result in increased competition for users.

In certain vertical areas, in particular those in which our business units operate, we and our joint ventures compete with services, including e-commerce, video search, online news aggregators and dictionaries, real estate and automobile services, and specialized search apps for mobile devices. Our Yandex.Taxi service competes with Citymobil (operated through a joint venture between Mail.ru and Sberbank) and Didi (a Chinese mobility operator who entered Russia in 2020) as well as a number of regional offline players across Russia. In addition, although Yandex.Taxi and Uber operate as a joint venture in Russia and neighboring countries, our Taxi business may also compete with Uber in jurisdictions outside the scope of our joint venture territory. Yandex.Market faces competition from a number of local players acting as both merchants and marketplaces, including Wildberries, Ozon, AliExpress Russia (operated through a joint venture between Mail.ru, MegaFon, RDIF, and Alibaba), and others. Our Classifieds services compete with Avito in most areas as well as with a number of niche players such as CIAN in real estate and Drom in automobile sales. On the Media Services front, our KinoPoisk service competes with ivi, Okko (controlled by Sberbank) and other online cinemas, while Yandex Music competes with VK Music and Boom (both operated by the Mail.ru), Apple Music and Spotify (which entered the Russian market in 2020). Our food delivery business Yandex.Eats competes with Delivery Club (a part of the joint venture between Sberbank and Mail.ru). Our hyperlocal grocery delivery service Yandex.Lavka competes with Samokat (operated through a joint venture between Mail.ru and Sberbank), Vprok and Okolo (both operated by X5 Retail Group), Sbermarket (operated by Sberbank) and others. Our Yandex.Drive car-sharing service competes with Delimobil, BelkaCar as well as a number of other players operating primarily in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Our public cloud platform competes mainly with international cloud services, such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS), as well as with certain local players (Rostelecom, Sberbank, Mail.ru).

We also face competition from other search and service providers in establishing relationships with device manufacturers, such as mobile and tablet computer makers, and access providers, such as internet service providers. Such companies have a significant degree of control over the distribution of products and services, including by offering or establishing exclusive arrangements for “default” search features or other services and bundling them with their offerings. Our users typically have direct relationships with these companies, and may be influenced by economic or other factors in deciding which search or other services to use.

Science and Education

Yandex has been developing and implementing educational programs since 2007. Today the company has more than 30 educational projects and services that are used by people of all ages – from first graders to graduate students, from young professionals to those who decided to change their career paths. Our team of specialists represents many scientific disciplines, including mathematics, data analysis, programming and linguistics. Besides working on products and technologies at Yandex, some of our experts teach, lecture and train students and young specialists.

The Yandex School of Data Analysis, offering free courses for undergraduates and graduate students, has been running since 2007. The school trains specialists in data processing, big data infrastructure, data analysis, and fact extraction in five Russian cities as well as in Minsk, Belarus. The school’s graduates create a global alumni network advancing machine learning and distributed systems development in academia and the private IT sector. In October 2018, we launched Y-Data, a branch of Yandex School of Data Analysis in partnership with Tel Aviv University, Israel. It offers an advanced one-year master’s degree program in machine learning. Yandex also has schools for project managers, user interface developers, designers and other specialists in IT.

In 2016, with the support of regional governments and ministries overseeing education and IT, we launched a project to teach programming to school children called Yandex.Lyceum which is now offered in 169 cities in Russia and Kazakhstan. Currently, over 10,000 teenagers are learning Python programming at Yandex.Lyceum.

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Yandex and the Higher School of Economics (HSE, one of the top universities in Russia which is also in the QS World University Rankings) jointly run the Faculty of Computer Science, for which we created an educational program. We also partner with other leading research centers and universities, including the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, The European University at Saint Petersburg, ITMO University, Moscow State University, Saint Petersburg State University, the New Economic School and the Ural Federal University. Yandex established joint labs for computer science research such as Yandex.Research-MIPT Lab and Yandex Scientific Laboratory at the Faculty of Computer Sciences of the HSE to promote collaboration in scientific field.

Every year, more than 1,500 students join Yandex partner degree programs at the leading universities in Russia and other countries, with over 6,200 graduates since 2007. We sponsor a number of contests and workshops/seminars in computer programming, mathematics and linguistics with participants from all over the world, and run an annual programming competition, Yandex Cup, in different fields of computer science such as backend, frontend, machine learning, mobile app development, data analytics and competitive programming.

In 2019, we launched Practicum, a practice-oriented online educational service for individuals who want to succeed in their careers. We’ve developed our own exclusive learning platform to help people acquire new skills and learn professions. In 2020, we launched 12 new programs in several countries, and now offer a total of 14 programs in areas such as Software Development, Data Science, Marketing, Design, and English for Russian speakers. Our courses are available in Russia, the USA, Israel and Germany. Over one million people have already explored our educational opportunities with thousands choosing to meet their professional goals with help of our platform.

To reward achievements in academics and research as well as to support undergraduate and postgraduate students in computer science and information technology at HSE, in 2014 we established the Ilya Segalovich Scholarship, in memory of one of our co-founders. The scholarship committee includes faculty staff members and lead developers from Yandex. Since 2014, this scholarship has been awarded to over 96 students.

To encourage scientific advancement in computer sciences we also established the annual Ilya Segalovich Award. This scholarship is awarded to graduate and postgraduate students or academic advisors delivering cutting-edge research across academic institutions in Russia, Belarus or Kazakhstan in machine learning, computer vision, information search and data analysis, natural language processing and machine translation, speech synthesis and speech recognition. Since 2019 it has been awarded to 25 young scientists and academic advisors.

In September 2019 we announced a new initiative to further advance our efforts to provide IT education and training to as many people as possible. The Educational Initiative is a Yandex program to advance education and improve the educational environment through technology. The program’s efforts include supporting technology education and research, developing digital skills, empowering teachers, and promoting the positive impact of technology on the learning process. Initially, the program’s goals included investment of more than $60 million into educational projects and training 100,000 specialists for the Russian IT industry over the course of three years, from 2020 to 2022. In November 2020, we announced that we would continue these investments on a permanent basis.

Since the launch of the Educational Initiative, over 180,000 teachers, working in schools across 85 regions of Russia — have upgraded their professional qualifications. Almost 22,000 participants joined the program’s contests, workshops, and courses.

The technology and professional experience behind the program helped us to quickly focus on supporting teachers and helping them to maintain the learning continuity during the coronavirus lockdown in the spring of 2020. Over the course of only a couple of weeks, we adapted the whole of the national curriculum for distance learning and broadcast lessons on our free streaming service Yandex.Live. The Yandex.School lessons were viewed over 4 million times during the lockdown.

Our other important educational initiatives include the following:

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Since 2010, we have been running a leading conference on technology and its impact on people’s lives – Yet Another Conference (YaC). In 2020, our annual conference on technology branched out to cover the role of technology in education – YaC/e. That online event gathered forward-thinking education professionals, entrepreneurs, managers and policymakers. The education industry leaders used the YaC/e platform to discuss current issues in education on the national and international levels, including how to adapt to the new reality during the pandemic and overcome the barriers to adopting the latest technologies in the process of teaching and learning.

Employees and Workplace Culture

We place a high value on technological innovation and compete aggressively for talent. We strive to hire the best computer scientists and engineers, as well as talented sales, marketing, financial and administrative staff. We seek to create a dynamic, fulfilling work environment with the best features of a “start-up” atmosphere, encouraging equal participation, creativity, the exchange of ideas and teamwork.

Our total headcount increased from 10,092 at December 31, 2019 to 11,864 at December 31, 2020, primarily as a result of consolidation of Yandex.Market. As of December 31, 2020, we had 6,459 employees related to the product development cost category, 4,690 employees related to sales, general and administration, and 715 employees related to cost of revenues.

Intellectual Property

We rely principally on a combination of trademark, copyright, related rights, patent and trade secret laws in Russia and other jurisdictions as well as confidentiality procedures and contractual provisions to protect our proprietary technology and our brand. We enter into confidentiality and patent assignment agreements with our employees and consultants and confidentiality agreements with other third parties, and we rigorously control access to our proprietary technology.

Our patent department is responsible for developing and implementing our group-wide IP protection strategy in selected jurisdictions. We have filed more than 950 patent applications to date, of which more than 600 have resulted in issued patents in Russia, the USA, China and Taiwan. We also have internal procedures for invention disclosures, patent filings, patent acquisitions, freedom-to-operate analyses and patentability searches.

We have three registered well-known trademarks in Russia - “Яndex”, “Yandex”, and “Яндекс” for certain services (classes 35, 38 and 42 under the International Classification of Goods and Services) on the basis of intensive use. Under Russian law, the protection granted to well-known trademarks is extended to non-homogeneous goods and services if customers associate specific use of the designation by third parties with the rights holder and the rights holder’s legitimate interests are infringed. Yandex is also a registered trademark in Ukraine, the United States, the European Union and other countries under the Madrid Agreement and Protocol. We have other registered trademarks in Russia and abroad. We continue to file applications to register new trademarks and widen the country coverage of our existing trademarks. Most of the software used by our services or distributed by Yandex to our users is either developed by our employees or by independent contractors who transfer all rights to Yandex.

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We enter into written license and use arrangements with providers of a significant portion of the content we offer. Our agreements with most of the news content providers in Russia are on “content-for-traffic” terms, pursuant to which we obtain access to news content for free in consideration of the user traffic that accesses the content providers’websites through our Yandex.News services. We license or purchase other additional content. We do not knowingly include content on our websites that we do not have the legal right to include.

We do not own the content generated or posted by users on our websites. As with all websites that host user-generated content, we are potentially liable for any intellectual property infringement committed by the creator of that content. If we receive a complaint from a party that user-generated content on our websites infringes that party’s copyright or related rights, we examine the content in question. If the complaint is substantiated, we remove the content and notify the party that has posted the content (if their contact details are available). If the user evidences that the content does not violate third parties’ intellectual property rights, it is possible to recover the deleted content. In the event of any court decision in the matter, we comply with the decision.

Facilities

Our principal operating subsidiary currently leases a total of approximately 64,500 square meters in a single location in central Moscow that serves as our group’s headquarters. We also lease additional office space of about 64,500 square meters in business centers in central Moscow, of which approximately 19,100 square meters relates to the contract for office space in Moscow City business center that we signed in December 2019 and 15,800 square meters relates to office space in Lotte Plaza business center. We or our operating subsidiaries also lease or own office space in a number of other cities in Russia. We also lease offices in Newburyport, Massachusetts, USA; Lucerne, Switzerland; Minsk, Belarus; Schiphol, The Netherlands; Shanghai, China; Almaty, Kazakhstan; Tel Aviv, Israel, and other locations. We operate data centers in Moscow and other regions of Russia, as well as in Finland. We have points of presence in a number of cities in Russia and elsewhere. Taking into account the projected demand for our services, we continuously evaluate the capacity and locations of our data centers to determine the most cost effective manner of delivering reliable services to our users.

In December 2018, we acquired a property site at 15 Kosygina Street, Moscow, Russia for our new Moscow headquarters. The acquisition cost of the property site amounted to 9.7 billion rubles (around $145 million, based on the exchange rate as of the transaction date) exclusive of 18% VAT.

Governance Structure

Overview

In December 2019, our shareholders approved targeted changes to Yandex’s corporate governance structure, which we refer to as the restructuring. Our Board proposed this restructuring in response to the evolving legal and regulatory environment in Russia, and designed these changes to balance the concerns of public authorities in our core market with the interests of our shareholders, employees and users.

Pursuant to this restructuring, a number of changes were made, including the establishment of the Public Interest Foundation and new Board Committees. The Board of Directors was also expanded to appoint two “designated directors”. In 2020, we learned to work in a new corporate governance structure and to interact with its new elements.

Public Interest Foundation

Public Interest Foundation has certain limited and targeted governance rights in our group. The Public Interest Foundation was incorporated in the Oktyabrskiy special administrative region in Kaliningrad, in the Russian Federation, under a newly adopted legislative framework. The Public Interest Foundation has no shareholders, owners or beneficiaries, and is governed by the Foundation’s Board of Directors comprising 11 directors, including members appointed by five leading Russian universities (Higher School of Economics, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Moscow State University, Saint Petersburg State University and the Saint Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics), and three non-governmental institutions (the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP), Moscow School of Management Skolkovo and the Endowment of

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Moscow School #57), all of which have long histories of cooperation with Yandex. The Public Interest Foundation Board also includes three representatives of Yandex management (initially, Arkady Volozh, Tigran Khudaverdyan and Elena Bunina). The statutory purpose of the Public Interest Foundation, as set out in its charter, is to preserve the continuity and promote the success of Yandex. The Public Interest Foundation is not permitted by its charter to engage in any commercial activities; its operating costs will be covered by Yandex.

Priority Share

The Public Interest Foundation holds our Priority Share, which gives the Public Interest Foundation the following rights:

Special Voting Interest in Yandex LLC

As an additional protection for the overall structure, the Public Interest Foundation holds a Special Voting Interest in Yandex LLC, which provides limited and defined powers that will be exercisable only in the case of what we describe as a Special Corporate Situation or a Special Situation related to a matter of national security.

Special Corporate Situations

A Special Corporate Situation is deemed to arise only in the following specific circumstances:

If the Foundation Board decides (acting by a specified majority) that any of the above triggers for a Special Corporate Situation has occurred, it must send a notice to Yandex, providing details of such matter. Following receipt of such notice, we may cure such matter within a defined period. If we do not cure such matter, the Public Interest Foundation will have the ability (acting by specified majority) to replace the General Director of Yandex LLC without the vote of Yandex N.V. The Public Interest Foundation will appoint an interim General Director from a pre-approved list. As soon as the situation is resolved, Yandex N.V. will remove the interim General Director and appoint a permanent

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General Director.

Special Situations related to a matter of national security

A Special Situation is a matter constituting an extraordinary one-off event related to matters of the national security of the Russian Federation requiring quick remedy.

If the Foundation Board decides (acting by a specified supermajority) that a Special Situation has occurred, it must send a notice to Yandex providing the details of such matter. Following receipt of such notice, we may cure such matter within a defined period. If we do not cure such matter, the Public Interest Foundation will have the ability (acting by specified majority) to replace the General Director of Yandex LLC without the vote of Yandex N.V. In interim General Director appointed under these circumstances will hold office for a limited period of time, after which Yandex N.V. will again have the right to appoint a permanent General Director.

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Conversion Provisions of the Class B Shares

In addition, as part of the restructuring, the automatic conversion feature of the Class B Shares was amended. Previously, such shares would immediately convert into Class A Shares upon the death of the holder. To avoid this “cliff-edge” scenario, in which the voting control of our company could suddenly shift, following this amendment Class B Shares held by a family trust will not automatically convert for a period of two years after the death of the holder. Mr. Volozh has established such a trust. Mr. Volozh also agreed to enter into a two-year lock-up agreement with respect to 95% of his Class B Shares.

A description of other standing Board committees can be found below under the heading “Item 6. Directors, Senior Management and Employees — Corporate Governance”.

Public Interest Committee

The Public Interest Committee has a right of approval over certain specified matters and consists of three members: the Yandex CEO (currently Mr. Volozh) and both of the designated directors (Messrs. Yakovitsky and Komissarov). Decisions of the Public Interest Committee must be unanimous. The Public Interest Committee will not review ordinary business or commercial matters; its right of approval will be limited to a defined list of the following specific matters deemed to be of public interest

Our Board cannot act in respect of any of these specified matters prior to receiving a recommendation from the Public Interest Committee. If the Public Interest Committee does not approve the matter referred to it, the Board will follow the decision of the Public Interest Committee, unless the Board rejects such decision by either (i) a supermajority of eight votes (subject to adjustment for Board vacancies), which must include the affirmative votes of the two designated directors; or (ii) a supermajority of eight votes (subject to adjustment for Board vacancies) (not including the affirmative votes of the two designated directors), provided that the Public Interest Foundation Board has given its approval. The Public Interest Committee will act only as a check on our Board’s actions; it cannot proactively make any decisions on behalf of the Board or require the Board to take any action.

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Government Regulation

We operate in a rapidly evolving environment of increasing regulatory complexity, reflecting a trend towards increasing scrutiny of large technology companies by policymakers, regulators and the general public in jurisdictions across the globe, including in Russia. As explained in more detail below, there are also a significant number of additional laws and regulations currently being debated and considered for adoption in Russia and other countries where we operate which, in the event of adoption, might require us to take significant steps to modify our operating, governance or ownership structure. Due to changing interpretations of laws and regulations, we could also be subject to laws and regulations to which we are not currently subject and which could materially affect our operations. We have not summarized laws and regulations to which we do not believe we are currently subject. See also “Risk Factors – If existing limitations on foreign ownership were to be extended to our business, or if new limitations were to be adopted, it could materially adversely affect our group and the value of our Class A shares”.

Regulation of Sensitive Businesses in Russia

In recent years, the Russian government has adopted a series of laws aimed at regulating the technology and internet sectors generally, as described in detail below. In addition, a number of laws have been adopted that impose restrictions on foreign ownership and control of businesses in sensitive sectors of the Russian economy, including strategically important enterprises and mass media, and we are aware of various discussions about potentially imposing similar restrictions on businesses such as ours. Most significantly, legislation was proposed in the Russian State Duma in the summer of 2019 that would have limited non-Russian ownership of “significant” internet companies to no more than 20%. Another recent draft law proposed restrictions to audiovisual services limiting their non-Russian ownership to no more than 20%. In case such a proposal were to be admitted to law and would be applied to Yandex, we will be forced to reevaluate and consequently modify the corporate structure of the KinoPoisk service, which is a part of Yandex Media Services.

Advertising Regulation

The principal Russian law governing advertising, including online advertising, is the Federal Law No. 38-FZ “On Advertising,” dated March 13, 2006 (as amended) (the “Russian Advertising Law”). The Russian Advertising Law prohibits advertisements for certain regulated products and services without the required certification, licensing or approval. For example, advertisements for products such as pharmaceuticals and medical equipment, food supplements and infant food, financial instruments or securities and financial services as well as incentive sweepstakes and advertisements aimed at minors and some other products and services must comply with specific requirements and must in certain cases be accompanied by certain required disclaimers. Additionally, Russian law contains certain prohibitions regarding the advertising of alcohol, tobacco and medical services. In addition, the distribution of advertisements over the internet (for example, by email) may require the prior express consent of recipients. In some cases, violation of these Russian laws can lead to civil action by third parties who suffer damages, or administrative penalties imposed by FAS. Further amendments to legislation regulating advertising may impact our ability to provide some of our services or limit the type of advertising we may offer. For instance, there is a working group (within the Analytical Center of the Government of the Russian Federation) developing the legislative proposal which would set forth detailed grounds for the self-regulation of the advertising business in Russia. The self-regulatory organization (which could be created on the basis of the new law) could be designated by the FAS to execute certain powers originally belonging to FAS, as well as such self-regulatory organization could impose the limitations on its members that could be stricter than those provided by the applicable law.

We seek to comply with all advertising laws and regulations. At the same time, the application of the advertising laws, in particular in relation to products or services requiring certification, licensing or approval, can be ambiguous and inconsistent. The application of these laws in an unanticipated manner, or the failure of our compliance efforts, may expose us to substantial liability as distributors of advertising and may restrict our ability to provide some of our services. Other laws or interpretations of laws, including those of foreign jurisdictions, may also restrict advertising and negatively impact our business. For example, some French courts have interpreted French trademark laws in ways that would limit the ability of competitors to advertise in connection with generic keywords. Adoption of similar interpretations by Russian or other national courts may adversely affect our business. Also, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation has issued clarification which states that some cases of the use of trademarks as keywords could be treated as an unfair competition. In addition, Russian law does not specifically regulate behavioral targeting in relation to

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advertising, which is a standard tool widely used in online business. Any future interpretation of Russian law affecting the regulation of behavioral targeting could have a negative impact on our business.

Intellectual Property Regulation

In principle, the acquisition, protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights in Russia are addressed in line with international standards. In particular, literary, artistic and scientific works are subject to copyright protection without any registration and enjoy legal protection simply by virtue of being created in an objective form perceivable by third parties.

Mandatory registration with Rospatent is required for “hard IP” such as trademarks and patents (available in Russia for inventions, utility models and industrial designs) in order for the rights holder to acquire exclusive rights. Trademarks registered abroad under the Madrid Agreement and/or Madrid Protocol have the same legal protection in Russia as locally registered trademarks. 

Under Russian law, we have exclusive rights to trade secrets (know-how) only if we have complied with a legal requirement to introduce reasonable measures to maintain confidentiality of our trade secrets. Such measures may be burdensome and difficult to implement. As we rely extensively in our operations on the protection afforded to trade secrets, we have implemented a set of measures required by Russian law in order to protect these trade secrets (know-how). However, there is a risk that our measures will be deemed insufficient and, as a result, we will fail to acquire rights to these trade secrets under Russian law.

One of the known problems and risks in Russian business practice relates to acquiring exclusive rights to works for hire and patentable results from employees. As a rule, the exclusive rights to works for hire and patentable results are assigned to the employer if the intellectual property is made during the course of employment. However, there are often uncertainties and disputes around the scope of such assignments. In case of employment disputes, Russian courts are often inclined to follow an overly formalistic approach and may take a pro-employee position in the event of uncertainty in a dispute of this nature.

Nonetheless, under Russian law, subject to the risks outlined above, we are deemed to have acquired copyrights and rights to file patent applications with respect to works for hire and patentable results created by our employees during the course of their employment with us and within the scope of their job duties, and have the exclusive rights to their further use and disposal subject to compliance with the requirements of the Civil Code of Russia.

Liability of Online Service Providers

Laws relating to the liability of online service providers for the activities of their users and other third parties are still being developed in Russia and certain other countries in which we operate. Recent laws adopted in Russia, such as the law on the regulation of social networks; the law regulating the placement of publicly available personal data on the internet; the law on criminal liability for libel on the internet; the law introducing significant fines for non-deletion of information by an information resource; the law prohibiting censorship of information resources, as well as a number of other laws, may substantially affect business operations.

Russian law contains provisions aimed at establishing a framework for limitation of liability of online service providers for the information communicated by third parties over such providers’ networks. Substantial ambiguity remains in Russian law around the scope and protection of such limitation of liability. In particular, there is little clarity on the limitation of liability with respect to the types of online service providers other than providers transmitting information and hosting providers (such as those caching data or providing information location tools). Because the law has not been given detailed binding interpretation, our exposure to liability will depend significantly on the interpretation of these provisions by the courts and officials.

The Russian Civil Code also imposes strict liability for infringement of intellectual property rights if such infringement is committed in connection with business activities. It might be unclear how these provisions apply to online service providers.

Russian law establishes a system for the blocking of websites that make available specific categories of illegal

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information related to child pornography, suicide or drug use as well as other restricted information. Current law also permits the blocking of websites for violation of data protection, copyright and related rights. The procedure for deleting such information is complex and strictly enforced and the failure to follow such procedures may lead to the blocking of the applicable website by all Russian internet service providers and telecommunication service operators. Yandex follows this law, however, compliance with these regulations by western technology companies has been inconsistent or non-existent.

Other legislation is currently in place in Russia that allows the blocking of websites that contain extremist information (including containing calls for mass rioting, extremist activity and participation in mass assemblies conducted in violation of established procedure) at the request of certain governmental authorities without prior notification. Only a subsequent post-blocking notification to the relevant website owner or hosting provider is required. The categories of illegal information to which access can be restricted may be interpreted broadly or be expanded by government authorities depending on circumstances. We may find ourselves subject to such blocking if government authorities interpret information provided by our services as violating these rules and we may be unable to prevent this blocking of our services.

Moreover, pursuant to recent legislative amendments, a website might be blocked if the published information contains disrespectful and indecent statements about the society, state, Constitution or governmental authorities. Additionally, the subjects who are accused of disseminating such statements can face administrative fines. Russian law also restricts the circulation of certain identified categories of publicly available and distributed information that may be harmful to minors. In particular, there is a requirement to take administrative and technical measures to prevent the dissemination of restricted information. In addition, the circulation of information products must be accompanied by a relevant mark identifying the age restriction category of information.

This legislation, as well any similar additional regulations (in Russia or abroad), and the interpretation of such legislation and regulations, may impose new requirements on us and our operations and lead to material legal liability, which can be difficult to foresee or limit. For instance, in December 2020 the European Commission proposed the draft of the Digital Services Act which is aimed at creating a common set of rules on obligations and accountability of online intermediaries providing services in the EU. The document is now under consideration of the European Parliament and Member States and, if adopted, could impose new obligations on our services provided (or to be provided in the future) to users in the EU. See “Risk Factors—We may be held liable for information or content displayed on, retrieved by or linked to our websites and mobile applications, or distributed by our users; or we may be required to block certain content or access to our websites could be restricted; any of which could harm our reputation, business, financial condition and results of operations”.    

In February 2020, draft legislation aimed at regulating big data in Russia was introduced and remains under consideration. The wording of the legislation is very broad and ambiguous, but would create a basis for further regulation in this sphere. In particular, it states that the Government should implement control over big data processing. Currently big data processing is not specifically covered by Russian law. This legislation, if adopted, may have a far-reaching impact on our business, which is difficult to estimate at the present time.

Applicability of the Russian Law on Strategic Enterprises

Under Russian law, a variety of activities related to encryption require a special permit (license) granted by the Federal Security Service (the “FSS”) subject to the applicant’s continued compliance with a number of licensing requirements, including the requirement to use only certified encryption means and equipment and to ensure timely extension of such certification when its terms expire.

We have also obtained an encryption license for our Yandex.Cloud service in order to expand this business. Therefore, the restrictions imposed by the strategic enterprises law have become applicable to Yandex as a whole. In particular, a third-party non-Russian investor would be required to obtain prior approval from the competent Russian authority in some cases if it seeks to acquire more than 25% of the voting power in Yandex or seeks to enter into an agreement that would establish direct or indirect control over Yandex. Such investors would also be required to notify the competent Russian authority if it acquires more than 5% of the voting power in Yandex (which would represent more than 33.3 million Class A shares). In addition, foreign states and international organizations, or entities controlled by them are prohibited from entering into agreements to establish direct or indirect control over Yandex.

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See also “Risk Factors— If existing limitations on foreign ownership were to be extended to our business, or if new limitations were to be adopted, it could materially adversely affect our group and the value of our Class A shares”.

Mass Media Regulation

Russian law requires certain parties that disseminate news and similar mass communications and information to be registered with the appropriate Russian governmental body, Roskomnadzor, and to comply with restrictions regarding the distributed content. The law currently permits electronic network publications (websites) to register as mass media. As registration under this amendment is voluntary, we elected not to register our online properties as mass media. See “Risk Factors — Because the range of the services we provide is increasing and the legal framework governing the operations in our markets is evolving, we may be required to obtain additional licenses, permits or registrations or comply with other requirements, which may be costly or may limit our flexibility to run our business.”

Since 2016, Russian law imposes a limit of no more than 20% on non-Russian ownership and control, direct or indirect, of Russian mass media. Accordingly, if our core business were to be required to register as a mass media, or if such law were otherwise amended to cover our business, it would have a material impact on the ownership structure of our business and could materially adversely affect the value of our Class A shares. See also “Risk Factors— If existing limitations on foreign ownership were to be extended to our business, or if new limitations were to be adopted, it could materially adversely affect our group and the value of our Class A shares”.

In addition, in March 2019 a new law came into force that imposes liability for the dissemination of “fake news” in mass media or telecommunication networks if such news items are potentially of social importance. The liability includes fines up to 1.5 million rubles (depending mainly on the consequences of such violation). It is difficult to predict how these norms will be interpreted in practice. This regulation can be applied to some of our services and, therefore, we could be held liable for the information published by third parties.

Internet Regulation

A recent draft law that partly came in force in November 2019 introduced tighter regulation of traffic routing in the Russian internet. While it is not entirely clear yet how this regulation will be applied in practice, its implementation, among other things, may lead to a requirement that Russian internet traffic should be routed through Russian communication centers. This could significantly reduce data transfer speeds significantly and even result in interruptions and delays of online services in Russia.

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Privacy and Personal Data Protection Regulation

We are subject to Russian and foreign laws regarding privacy and the protection of our users’ personal data. We publish on our websites our privacy policies and practices concerning the use, processing, storage and disclosure of user data. Any failure by us to comply with our privacy policies as well as Russian or other applicable laws and regulations relating to privacy and the protection of user data may result in proceedings against us by governmental authorities, individuals or other third parties, which may adversely impact our business. In addition, the adoption and interpretation of data protection laws, and their application to internet operations, are often unclear, difficult to predict and in a constant state of development. Although we believe that we comply with all current requirements, these laws could in the future be interpreted and applied in a manner that is inconsistent with current practice. For instance, in May 2014 the Court of Justice of the European Union established that an operator of a search engine can be obligated to remove from the list of search results links to webpages containing inaccurate or outdated information related to an individual. Russian personal data laws have been amended, granting a similar right to Russian citizens, who may apply for the removal of search results that link to inaccurate or irrelevant information about them. In addition, in May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, came into force in the EU. We believe that we have taken all necessary steps to comply with the applicable requirements of the GDPR, although our exposure to users in the EU is relatively limited. Nevertheless, some provisions of the GDPR are formulated broadly and their interpretation by the competent authorities might be unpredictable. Therefore, we may fail to interpret all the requirements in accordance with the official interpretation and may be held liable for noncompliance.

Russian data protection laws provide that an individual must freely consent to the processing of her/his personal

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data. Such consent must be concrete, informed and conscious, and may be provided in any form evidencing the fact that consent has been provided, unless otherwise established by federal law, which requires that it be made in writing, signed by digital electronic signature or evidenced in a similar manner prescribed by laws and regulations.

We, like our peers, seek this consent from our users by asking them to click on a button or select a check-box in appropriate circumstances prior to commencement of the account registration process, indicating the user’s consent to our collection, use, storage and processing of personal data. Furthermore, many of our services do not require the creation of an account prior to their use and we collect only limited information in these circumstances. In particular, we place cookies and use other widespread technologies that assist us in improving user experience of our products and services and ultimately benefit both our users and advertisers through behavioral targeting of advertising. No clear legislative guidelines have been provided addressing whether our practices are compliant with the requirements of the data protection legislation in Russia and abroad. There is a risk that such laws may be interpreted and applied in a manner that is not consistent with our current data protection practices. Complying with various regulations in this area may cause us to incur additional costs or to change our business practices. Further, any failure by us to protect our users’ privacy and data may result in a decrease of user confidence in our services, and may ultimately result in a loss of users, which would adversely affect our business.

Russian legislation also regulates “organizers of information distribution”. Organizers of information distribution must retain a broad range of data relating to and generated by users for a period of time and provide such data to security and investigation authorities at their request. Organizers of information distribution that use encryption when delivering or processing electronic messages have to provide the security authorities with information necessary for decoding the delivered or processed messages. If an organizer of information distribution fails to comply with the above requirements, the Russian authorities can prescribe the blocking of access to the services of such organizer of information distribution.

Russian personal data law also requires that companies store all personal data of Russian users only in databases located inside Russia. Although we have data centers located in Russia, this law could limit our flexibility in managing our operations globally. Failure to comply with applicable data protection legislation may lead to the restriction of access to our services. For example, in 2016 a Russian court ordered the blocking of access to a popular social networking website for violation of data protection legislation.

Licenses for the Provision of Particular Services

Entities that provide certain telecommunication services for a fee are required under Russian law to obtain a “telematics” license from Roskomnadzor. In order to increase our range of services and diversify our business, we have obtained the required licenses (including telematic licenses) necessary for the provision of certain of our services in Russia. However, we generally do not charge a fee for the online services we provide to our users and therefore believe that we are not required to hold a telematics license for provision of these services. We do, however, generate revenue from ads directed to our users. As a result, it is possible that a Russian court or government agency may construe our online advertising revenues as a fee and determine that we are required to hold an additional telematics license for such services, which would require us to apply for and comply with the terms of any such license.

Additionally, we may in certain cases offer user services for a fee, which could require us to comply with the licensing requirements described above.

Antimonopoly Regulation

Russian law grants to the Federal Antimonopoly Service, or FAS, wide powers and authorities to maintain competition in the market, including approval or monitoring of mergers and acquisitions, establishment of rules of conduct for market players occupying dominant positions, prosecution of any abuse of a dominant position, and prevention of cartels and other anti-competitive agreements or practices. The regulator may impose significant administrative fines (up to 15% of the annual revenue derived in the market where the violation occurred) on market players that abuse their dominant position or otherwise restrict competition, and is entitled to challenge contracts, agreements or transactions that are in violation of the antimonopoly regulation. We could be considered to possess a substantial (and even dominant) market share in the online advertising market, ride-hailing market and/or other markets in which we operate. We understand that the regulator from time to time focuses on internet services and, for instance,

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could in the future recognize online advertising as a separate market, identify dominant players and impose conduct limitations and other restrictions.

In addition, the “fifth antimonopoly package” developed by FAS is currently under consideration, which would introduce amendments to the existing antimonopoly legislation with regard to digital markets and IP. The new legislation aims to facilitate the review of cases in this sphere. In particular, the document specifies new triggers for determining the dominant position of a digital transactional platform. Therefore, this legislation, if adopted, may have a far-reaching impact on our business, which is difficult to estimate at the present time.

Taxation Regulation

Taxation of legal entities and individuals in Russia is regulated primarily by the Tax Code of the Russian Federation. The scope and application of the Tax Code is elaborated by numerous regulations and clarifications from the Ministry of Finance of Russia and by the Federal Tax Service, which enforces the tax laws. Russian tax law and procedures are still not fully developed and local divisions of the Federal Tax Service have considerable autonomy in tax law interpretation and could potentially interpret tax rules inconsistently. Also, there is extensive court practice on the construction of the Code’s provisions, which can sometimes be unpredictable or even contradictory. Both the substantive provisions of the Russian tax law and the interpretation and application of those provisions by the Russian tax authorities and by Russian courts may be subject to rapid and unpredictable change. See “Risk Factors — Changes in the tax systems in the countries in which we operate, or unpredictable or unforeseen application of existing rules, may materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.”

Consumer Protection Legislation

Recent amendments to Russian consumer protection legislation impose duties on aggregators of information about goods and services. These norms are applicable to some of our and Yandex.Market’s services and the failure to comply with such norms could lead to liability.

In addition, amendments to the Russian law on protection of consumers set out requirements for pre-installation of local Russian applications on mobile devices, laptop and desktop computers, and smart TV sets applicable as of April 1, 2021. The list of apps for pre-installation includes search, browser, maps, social networks, cloud storage and some others. The requirement is to be expanded as of July 1, 2021 to include default search in browsers. The exact implementation of the pre-installation requirements is still under discussion and may not have significant near-term impact on our operations.

Also, the draft law "On unacceptable contract terms that infringe on the rights of consumers" developed by Rospotrebnadzor provides for a wide list of contract terms that are prohibited from including in a contract with consumers not only for merchants, but also for aggregators of information about goods and services. There is civil and administrative liability in the event of non-compliance with the requirements.The wording used in the draft law is vague and generalized, which can lead to legal uncertainty and negatively affect the company's services that interact with consumers (and may result in liability for violation of such law).

Securities Regulation

Our Class A ordinary shares are currently listed on the NASDAQ Global Select Market and in June 2014 were admitted to trading on Moscow Exchange; therefore, we are required to comply with specific Russian regulation concerning information disclosure, insider trading and certain other requirements as may be applied to foreign issuers in Russia.

Regulation of Self-Driving cars

Our Self-Driving Group is subject to extensive and evolving regulation with respect to this new technology and operating model. In particular, current and emerging regulations govern the ability to test autonomous vehicles on public roads, which is an important stage in the introduction of autonomous technology to the transportation infrastructure and the development of driverless taxi services.

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Autonomous vehicles are allowed on public roads in Russia in a test mode under Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation of November 26, 2018 No. 1415 (the “Decree”). Such testing is subject to the following restrictions: presence of a driver behind the wheel; limitations to certain territories, currently including Moscow, Saint-Petersburg and the Republic of Tatarstan; and a prohibition on the commercial testing of self-driving cars. Such restrictions complicate the development of autonomous driving systems.

A law on experimental legal regimes in the field of digital innovations was recently enacted in the Russian Federation. This law aims to ease the legal regulation applicable to developers of digital innovations in seeking formal approval for innovative solution applications, including self-driving cars. There are also discussions underway regarding the bill of amendment to the current legal regulation which impedes such formal approval of digital innovations, which would formally introduce a regime for experimental technologies

Regulations of Other Business Units; Other Jurisdictions

A number of our business units, including in particular Taxi, operate in sectors that are subject to extensive governmental scrutiny and rapidly evolving regulatory requirements, both in Russia and in other jurisdictions in which we operate or may begin operating. We continuously monitor such regulatory developments and actively participate where appropriate in the development of the regulatory frameworks for these emerging businesses and operating models.  

In addition, because many of our services are accessible worldwide and are becoming increasingly available to other users globally, certain foreign jurisdictions, including those in which we have not established a local office, employees or infrastructure, may require us to comply with their local laws.

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Our yandex.ru website first began generating revenue in 1998. We became profitable in 2003 and have been profitable every year since then.

Online advertising revenues accounted for 80.4%, 69.4% and 57.9% of our total revenues in 2018, 2019 and 2020, respectively. Our online advertising revenues consist of fees charged to advertisers for serving online ads on our websites and those of our partners in the Yandex Advertising Network. Our advertising clients place a significant majority of their performance based ads through Yandex.Direct. We sell approximately half of performance-based ads on a prepaid basis. Our Yandex.Direct advertisers pay us on a cost per click (CPC) basis, which means that we recognize revenue only when a user clicks on one of our advertisers’ ads. Our brand advertising is generally sold on a cost per thousand (CPM) impressions basis. For these ads, we recognize as revenue the fees charged to advertisers when their ads are displayed. We recognize our online advertising revenues net of value added tax and sales commissions and bonuses. Although the majority of our revenues is generated by direct sales to our advertisers, a significant portion of our advertising is sold through media agencies. We recognize revenues from those advertising sales net of the commissions and bonuses paid to these agencies.

We benefit from a large and diverse base of advertisers. Our advertisers include individuals and small, medium and large enterprises across Russia and the other countries in which we operate, as well as large multinational corporations. No individual advertiser accounted for more than 1.1% of our total revenues in 2018, 2019 or 2020. On a geographical basis, we generated more than 92% of our total revenues in each of 2018, 2019 and 2020 from advertisers and other customers with billing addresses in Russia, including the Russian offices of large multinational corporations.

We serve ads both on our own websites and on the websites of our partners in the Yandex Advertising Network. For performance-based ads served on the websites of our partners in the Yandex Advertising Network, we recognize as revenue the fees paid to us by advertisers each time a user clicks on one of their performance-based ads or, for those advertisers paying for brand ads on a CPM basis, as their ads are displayed. We pay our partners in the Yandex Advertising Network fees for serving our advertisers’ ads on their websites. These fees are primarily based on revenue-sharing arrangements. As such, the fees paid to our partners in the Yandex Advertising Network are calculated as a percentage of the revenues we earn by serving ads on partners’ websites. We account for the fees we pay to our partners in the Yandex Advertising Network as traffic acquisition costs, a component of cost of revenues. Since we launched our Yandex Advertising Network in 2006, these costs annually have, in aggregate, amounted to more than one-half of the revenues we have earned from serving ads on the Yandex Advertising Network and we expect them to continue to do so in the foreseeable future. Yandex Advertising Network partners do not pay us any fees associated with our serving ads on their websites.

Our agreements with our partners in the Yandex Advertising Network generally have an indefinite term and may be terminated by either party at will with no termination fees. Agreements with larger partners in the Yandex Advertising Network are individually negotiated and vary in duration but typically renew automatically. In 2018, 2019 and 2020, none of our advertising network partners accounted for more than 4% of our total revenues. In 2020, Avito and Mail.ru Group continued to be our most significant advertising network partners.

We believe the most significant factors that influence our ability to continue to increase our online advertising revenues include the following:

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Segments

During 2020, we revised our organizational structure, separating several focus areas into product lines. As a result, our businesses are now organized in the following operating segments:

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Assuming no further escalation of the coronavirus pandemic and gradual improvement of the situation from the second quarter of the year, we expect our total group revenues to be between 305 and 320 billion rubles for the full year 2021. The growth will be primarily driven by the acceleration of revenue growth across our E-commerce businesses (Yandex.Market, Lavka and grocery delivery within Yandex.Eats), as well as a recovery in Search and Portal and Taxi segments.

Our operating margins of our Search and Portal business, representing our income from operations as a percentage of revenues, may fluctuate in the future depending on the percentage of our online advertising revenues that we derive from the Yandex Advertising Network compared with our own websites. The operating margin we realize on revenues generated from the websites of our partners in the Yandex Advertising Network is significantly lower than the operating margin generated from our own websites. The percentage of our online advertising revenues derived from the Yandex Advertising Network decreased from 23.4% in 2018 to 20.8% in 2019 and to 16.8% in 2020.

Growth in mobile search may also have an impact on our operating margins. The number of search queries from mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, is growing more quickly than desktop queries. Queries from mobile devices represented 60.5% of our total search queries and 53.3% of our search revenues in the fourth quarter of 2020. To date, growth in mobile usage has not had a material impact on our pricing, revenues or operating margins; however, we have seen some evidence that this growth may exert modest downward pressure on our operating margins in the future.

Another factor, that affects the operating margin of Search and Portal, is our Internet of Things business, represented by production and sales of Yandex.Stations and other devices, as we recognize revenues and cost of revenues in this segment on a gross basis.

Our consolidated operating margin has been decreasing in the recent periods on the back of growing investments into our non-advertising businesses such as Yandex.Market, FoodTech and Media Services as well as continuing research and development of self-driving cars and a number of other initiatives. At the same time, Ride-Hailing and Classifieds businesses have significantly improved their profitability and delivered solid margins in 2020, which has partially offset the impact from changing business mix and our investments into new initiatives.

Recent and future capital expenditures may also put pressure on our operating margins. Our capital expenditures decreased from RUB 28,323 million in 2018 to RUB 20,543 million in 2019, with an increase to RUB 24,551 million in 2020. We spent approximately 66% of our total capital expenditures in 2020 on servers and data center expansion to support growth in our operations. Our depreciation and amortization expense decreased as a percentage of revenues from 9.5% in 2018 to 8.4% in 2019, and to 8.1% in 2020. We currently expect our capital expenditures to decrease as a percentage of revenues from 10.4% in 2020 to approximately 9% in 2021, excluding the effect of our new headquarters construction. However, if we decide to undertake any new capital projects, our capital expenditures may increase as a percentage of our revenues in 2021.

To support further brand enhancement and respond to competitive pressures, we spent larger amounts in 2018, 2019 and 2020 on advertising and marketing than we have spent historically, in absolute terms. A significant portion of our advertising and marketing expense in 2019 and 2020 relates to our efforts to promote our Yandex.Taxi and our Search services as well as Media Services, Yandex.Market and Classifieds, and to support our brand in Russia and the other markets in which we operate. We expect to continue to invest in advertising and marketing. We currently expect our overall advertising and marketing costs in 2021 to remain roughly stable as a percentage of revenues in comparison to 2020 due to continuing investment to promote our services. This spending will not significantly impact our operating margin. The COVID-19 pandemic has put pressure on our core advertising and ride-hailing businesses, while at the same time creating a number of new opportunities that we believe further strengthen the company’s long-term potential. Our immediate focus on cost optimization and improving operational efficiency after the start of the lockdown has enabled us to mitigate the negative impact of the pandemic on our financial performance.

Our revenues are impacted by seasonal fluctuations in internet usage and in advertising expenditures. Internet usage and advertising expenditures generally slow down during the months when there are extended Russian public holidays and vacations, and are significantly higher in the fourth quarter of each year. Moreover, expenditures by advertisers tend to be cyclical, reflecting overall economic conditions, retail patterns and advertising budgeting and buying patterns.

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For ride-hailing business we generate higher revenues in the second half of the year, particularly, in the fourth quarter, in part due to holiday demand and a pick up in general economic activity. Lower revenues are generated in the first half of the year, particularly, in the second quarter, mainly due to increased investments in driver supply, as we compete with other sectors that ramp up hiring activities in the spring (i.e., the construction sector).

For FoodTech business we expect to experience seasonal increases in our revenues in the first and fourth quarters, although the high growth rates have so far masked seasonal fluctuations. In 2020 we experienced less seasonality as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and related restrictions, which accelerated the growth of the food and grocery delivery verticals.

Inflation in Russia has also impacted our results of operations and may continue to do so. According to the Russian Federal State Statistics Service, Rosstat, the consumer price index in Russia increased to 4.3% in 2018 and decreased to 3% in 2019, respectively, and increased to 4.9% in 2020. We can provide no assurance that the annual rate of inflation will not increase significantly in 2021. Higher rates of inflation may accelerate increases in our operating expenses and capital expenditures and reduce the value and purchasing power of our ruble denominated assets, such as cash and cash equivalents.

Changes in the value of the U.S. dollar compared with the Russian ruble can also negatively affect our results of operations. See “Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures About Market Risk—Foreign Currency Exchange Risk.”

Recent Acquisitions

Uber

In February 2018, we and Uber International C.V. ( “Uber”), a subsidiary of Uber Technologies Inc., completed the combination of Yandex.Taxi Holding B.V. with several Uber legal entities into MLU B.V., a Dutch private limited liability company. We and Uber each contributed our legal entities operating our ride-hailing and food delivery businesses in Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Moldova and $100.0 million (RUB 5,722 million as of the date of acquisition) and $225.0 million (RUB 12,874 million as of the date of acquisition) in cash, respectively. The merger was accounted for as a business combination. A further description of the acquisition and its accounting implications can be found in Note 3 of our audited consolidated financial statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report.

Edadeal

In October 2018, we completed the acquisition of 90% in Edadeal LLC and its subsidiary (“Edadeal”), a daily deal and coupon aggregator, which is used to find deals at grocery stores, thus increasing our ownership from 10% to 100%. Cash consideration totaled RUB 233 million.

Other Acquisitions in 2018

During the year ended December 31, 2018, we completed other acquisitions for total consideration of approximately RUB 751 million.

TheQuestion

In March 2019, we completed the acquisition of assets and assumed liabilities of Znanie Company Limited (Cyprus) and its two subsidiaries, Znanie Development Company Limited (Cyprus) and Znanie LLC (Russia) (“TheQuestion”). TheQuestion is an internet-based question-and-answer social network. The primary purpose of the acquisition of TheQuestion was to enlarge the database of answers to specific search queries and to enhance the quality of search results provided by Yandex’s Search portal. The fair value of consideration transferred totaled RUB 384 million, including cash consideration of RUB 351 million and deferred consideration of RUB 33 million. The deferred consideration arrangement requires us to pay the additional cash consideration to the sellers within a four-year period. No additional consideration has been paid to date.

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Yandex.Market

On April 27, 2018, we and Sberbank formed a joint venture based on the Yandex.Market platform. As a part of the deal, Sberbank subscribed for new ordinary shares of Yandex.Market for RUB 30,000 million. Following that transaction, we and Sberbank each held an equal number of the outstanding shares in Yandex.Market, with up to 10% of outstanding shares allocated to management via an equity incentive pool. We retained a noncontrolling interest and significant influence over Yandex.Market's business.

On June 23, 2020, we and Sberbank entered into a binding agreement to reorganize our joint ventures, Yandex.Market and Yandex.Money. On July 23, 2020, we completed the acquisition of the Sberbank interest in Yandex.Market (approximately 50%) for RUB 42,000 million and sold to Sberbank a 25% plus RUB 1 interest in Yandex.Money for approximately RUB 2,420 million. We paid net cash consideration of RUB 39,580 million. The acquisition is accounted for as a step-acquisition under business combination rules.

A further description of the joint venture formation, the acquisition and their accounting implications can be found in Note 3 of our audited consolidated financial statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report.

Other Acquisitions in 2020

During the year ended December 31, 2020, we completed other acquisitions for a total consideration of approximately RUB 529 million.

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A further description of the acquisitions and their accounting implications can be found in Note 3 of our audited consolidated financial statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report.

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Our consolidated income from operations as a percentage of total revenues decreased from 16.3% in 2018 to 14.1% in 2019, and to 7.4% in 2020. The lower margin in 2020 compared with 2019 was primarily due to an increase as a percentage of our total revenues of costs related to our low-margin segments and experiments, as well as due to the effect of Yandex.Market consolidation. The lower margin in 2019 compared with 2018 was primarily due to an increase as a percentage of our total revenues of costs related to our experiments and low-margin segments, as well as costs related to Yandex.Drive and Media Services, which were partially offset by a decrease as a percentage of our total revenues in depreciation and amortization expenses.

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We expect the increasing contribution of our lower margin segments as a percentage of total revenues to weigh on our group operating margin in the near-term.

The following table presents our historical results of operations by reportable segment for the periods indicated:

Eliminations represent the elimination of transaction results between the reportable segments, primarily related to advertising, brand royalties and server costs. Adjusted operating costs and expenses of reportable segments exclude share-based compensation expense, amortization of acquisition-related intangible assets, goodwill impairment and compensation expense related to contingent consideration, as well as one-off restructuring costs.

For the reconciliation between total adjusted operating income and net income see Note 17 — “Information about segments, revenues & geographic areas” in the Notes to our consolidated financial statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report.

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