From what I have gathered the atmosphere in Yandex is loaded and complex. Yandex is a huge beneficiary from the war but a lot of people in the company are conflicted about it.
Let me clarify this: Yandex would clearly do better without the war but unlike many other companies it will come out ahead as it can pick up a lot of business through "import substitution".
Benefiting from something doesn't mean you won't suffer losses anyway. At this point which Russian company isn't performing negatively different since the day of the invasion?
How does it benefit from the war? I had the impression that they were caught in a pretty bad situation due to their outstanding debts and their suspension from nasdaq so that's very surprising!
They are basically "google of Russia" - main search engine, browser, etc. Waiting till Russia cuts off YouTube and the rest.
They basically adopt western open-source for Russian government (review and such). Their browser is Chromium, machine learning is Tensor Flow, etc. They also work in cybersecurity for Russian government (including conducting attacks).
I don't know if it's much of a benefit, but as an outsider, I assume Yandex will essentially pick up the entirety of the Russian market for search, maps, and other tools if US services are blocked or frowned upon?
Advertising, for example, is a significant revenue stream for Yandex and the advertising market has lost a lot of businesses, so it's possible that the entire Russian ad market is now worth less than whatever the Yandex' share was back in February.
Search and maps was already theirs. However they got chance to expand in Yandex Phone space (replacing iPhones/Androids) and perhaps in desktop OS space (replacing Chromebooks and maybe Windows).
Search/ads and ride/delivery services. As you may know Yandex has very advanced SDC system which was used(SDC robots) by Grubhub in Arizona University. They have delivery services in London/Paris and taxi services in Insrael and couple European countries.
As for the Russia I found news(in Russian) that McDonalds was huge part of orders in delivery service. Ads system fully broken because of Google suspension. Without concurents average prices will rise exponentially. Small business will not be able to buy ads and will closed in near feature.
Russians trade on it. Maybe they do have an overly rosy view of the company's fortunes, I dunno -- I don't know much about their business, how sensitive it is to the conflict and sanctions.
The stock price movement is easier to reason about, I guess. By that metric they've had a worse year than Salesforce, Netflix, Uber, Google. I'd agree that the conflict isn't good for them, but "worthless" is a bit strong for my palate.
