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Image by Yandex via CrunchBaseVoracious investor appetite for shares of Russian search engine Yandex turned its CEO into a billionaire today.
Yandex listed its shares on the Nasdaq market today at $25 a share. The stock soared 55% to close at $38.84. That makes the 40.5 million shares owned by Arkady Volozh, 47, the CEO of Yandex and its main founder, worth $1.57 billion. Volozh also sold slightly more than 4 million shares in the offering, worth a pre-tax $96 million.
Yandex, the largest search engine in Russia, has been called the Google of that country. The company says it generated 64% of search traffic in Russia in 2010 and it is the largest Russian Internet company in terms of revenue. The company earned profits of US$134 million on revenue of US$440 million, according to its offering prospectus.
Volozh is the principal founder of Yandex and has been the CEO since 2000. He started working on search algorithms in 1989, long before popular adoption of the Internet. Volozh co-founded several information technology companies prior to starting Yandex and he has a degree in applied mathematics from the Gubkin Insitute of Oil and Gas.
The Yandex offering comes at a time when appetite for Internet-related companies is incredibly –some might say unsustainably – high. Witness the frenzy over shares of LinkedIn (LNKD), the career-focused social networking site that went public last week and now sports a market capitalization of a dizzy $9 billion. LinkedIn earned $15 million in profits last year. Volozh’s billionaire status will turn on whether investors remain enthusiastic about Yandex’s propects for growth. Yandex’s current market capitalization is $5 billion — 11 times 2010 revenues. Hat tip to Eric Savitz for being the first to discover Volozh’s billionaire status–and letting me know about it.
source: forbes.com
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