Can a regional internet giant find success in a foreign market?
This is the question that Yandex, the Russian search engine, is asking as it seeks to replicate its Russian success in a country where it lacks the linguistic and cultural advantages it enjoys in Moscow.
Yandex launched its Turkish site, yandex.com.tr, in September, and is prepared to take on Google in other European markets where its American competitor holds a virtual monopoly.
While Yandex isn’t hoping to usurp Google or make inroads in its US home market, it does think it can be a viable competitor, and a viable alternative for consumers in those markets, says Ilya Segaolovich, Yandex’s co-founder and chief technology officer.
“In some European countries there is no such thing [as Yahoo]. They have Google and that’s it,” he told a small group of journalists in Moscow on Wednesday. “The idea that we are trying to touch is [whether] it’s possible to change that state of mind and people will use the second option.”
Segalovich stressed that Yandex would be looking at very specific markets, and is not trying to become the next Google. “It’s not a global view. It’s not like we are going to become [the world's] number-three search engine…It’s a trans-local approach.”
According to Segalovich, it will take about 18 months for the company to determine whether its operations in Turkey hold potential and whether it will take the strategy forwards to other markets.
In January the Turkish site reached 100,000 daily users, and, like Yandex, contains mobile, maps and music streaming apps.
Maps have always been a strong point for Yandex, which has been able to chart small Russian towns, that Google hasn’t, and provide the most accurate readings of Moscow traffic. And it is niches like this that may give Yandex an edge. Before Yandex Maps entered Turkey for instance, no online map service, including Google Maps, gave Istanbul house numbers, Segalovich says.
Preparing for the Turkey launch was difficult, he admits, and required reworking the company’s entire internal development infrastructure so that they could teach Yandex’s Russian programmers to build a site whose content they couldn’t actually understand. “None of our engineers understand Turkish,” says Segalovich. “It’s like gibberish to them. It’s like a moon language.”
Yet now that the one-year restructuring process has been completed, it should be relatively easy for Yandex to repeat the process in a completely different market and language, he claims. And the company may very well be right.
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