BCN-09 Sberbank, Mail.Ru wade into Russian delivery market

411

ZCZC

BCN-09

RUSSIA-E-COMMERCE-DELIVERY

Sberbank, Mail.Ru wade into Russian delivery market

MOSCOW, Nov 19, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Russia’s largest consumer lending bank
Sberbank and leading internet group Mail.ru on Tuesday announced a $1bn joint
taxi and food delivery platform.

The resulting joint venture will be a “leading O2O (online to offline)
services platform in mobility and food tech,” Sberbank and Mail.Ru said in a
statement.

The yet unnamed joint venture is still pending approval from a government
anti-monopoly regulator, but the plan is for the parties to have equal
stakes.

They plan to create synergy between Mail.ru’s existing taxi and food
delivery services and Sberbank’s online grocery shopping, restaurant booking
and loyalty programmes.

Alongside the joint venture, Sberbank is buying into the majority owner of
Mail.Ru Group, MF Technologies, purchasing a combined 36 percent share from
Gazprombank and Rostec in a deal valued at 11.3 bn rubles ($177 million). MF
Technologies owns 58.9 percent of Mail.Ru’s voting rights.

The new platform, which was first announced in July, will rival services of
Yandex group, including Yandex Taxi, Yandex Food and Yandex Money, in some of
which Sberbank has also invested.

Reports earlier this year said that due to a corporate rift, Sberbank may
exit from its Yandex Market venture with Yandex, billed as the next “Russian
Amazon” when it was launched last year.

Yandex, which operates Russia’s largest search engine and news aggregator,
on Monday announced planned governance structure changes under which a new
foundation would be able to block any single entity from accumulating 10
percent or more of its economic or voting interests.

The changes are a reaction to government fears of foreign ownership in the
giant company.

Sberbank currently holds the Yandex “golden share” allowing it to veto
consolidation of 25 percent or more of the company’s shares, but has
signalled it is ready to cede it to allow the restructuring to move forward.

BSS/AFP/RY/1840 hrs