Yandex Announces New Board of Directors

Posted by By Dan Taylor 3 Min Read

Yandex MKPAO has announced the formation of its new Board of Directors, comprising nine members from diverse backgrounds. The board includes representatives from the Yandex Managers Fund and ZPIF Consortium.First, as well as the Public Interest Foundation.

Representatives from the Yandex Managers Fund:

  • Artem Savinovsky: CEO of Yandex MKPAO and Yandex LLC, with the company since 2008.
  • Svetlana Yachevskaya: Lawyer and member of the board of trustees of the European University.

Representatives from ZPIF “Consortium.First”:

  • Alexander Ivlev: Independent consultant and former managing partner of EY CIS.
  • Anton Sychev: CFO of Litasco Middle East, independent board member of Norilsk Nickel, and former managing director of Goldman Sachs in Russia and the CIS.
  • Alexander Chachava: Entrepreneur, founder of LETA Capital, and co-founder of IT company PRO32.
  • Alexey Yakovitsky: Former board member of the Dutch Yandex NV from 2019 to 2024.
  • Evgeny Yakushkin: Consultant with previous roles at AliExpress Russia, Microsoft, and McKinsey & Company.
  • Pavel Dengin: Deputy General Director for Products at INFINITUM and member of the HSE Endowment Fund investment committee.

Representatives from the Public Interest Foundation:

  • Andrey Betin: Executive director of “Russia – Country of Opportunities” and rector of the Senezh Management Workshop, former board member of Dutch Yandex NV from 2023 to 2024.

Company Structure and Stock Trading

MKPAO Yandex, the parent company of the Yandex Group, is primarily owned by ZPIF Consortium.First. Yandex shares will start trading on the Moscow Exchange under the ticker YDEX from July 10, 2024.

Background and Recent Developments

In early February 2024, Dutch Yandex NV finalized a deal to sell the Yandex business, making ZPIF Consortium.First the main owner. Yandex managers hold a 35% stake in the mutual investment fund Consortium.First. As part of the deal, Yandex NV agreed not to create competing services for five years.

In mid-February, the board of Yandex NV approved the sale of its Russian assets. In early March, the Russian Government’s Subcommittee for Foreign Investments approved the acquisition of 96.3% of Yandex shares by Yandex MKPAO from Yandex NV.

This restructuring is a significant step in Yandex’s evolution, ensuring its continued growth and innovation in the tech and media sectors.

Source: Yandex

Dan Taylor
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Dan Taylor is the founder and editor of International Search Insights (ISI), the publication behind ReadIsi, and a Partner and Head of Innovation (Search & AI) at SALT.agency. He has worked in search for more than a decade, in-house and agency-side, and is regarded as one of the West’s leading voices on search engines beyond Google, including Yandex, Baidu, Naver and Cốc Cốc. On ReadIsi, Dan covers the engines and AI answer platforms that English-language coverage tends to miss: Baidu and ERNIE, Yandex and Alice AI, Naver, Cốc Cốc, Shenma, Sogou, WeChat and Weibo search, plus DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. He also keeps dated records of documented changes, such as the Yandex, Baidu and Naver algorithm update histories and the DeepSeek, ERNIE and Qwen model update histories. His approach is to take learnings from global search engines and apply logic with a high evidence threshold. A claim needs a source, patterns seen in one market are treated as a hypothesis until they are checked in another, and where the evidence is thin he says so. For brands, that means advice built on what can be shown, with measurement that separates being cited from being chosen. Dan is credited with coining the term “edge SEO” and won the inaugural TechSEO Boost research competition in 2018 for his work on CDN and edge changes for SEO. In 2026 he was credited with coining “Infinite Tail” to describe how keyword research is changing with AI search. He is the author of AI Search Marketing For The Travel Sector, writes for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Travel Marketing Guy, and has advised technology, SaaS, travel and enterprise ecommerce brands, including Cloudflare, GitLab and Airbnb. He has given multiple talks and panels at the International Search Summit in Barcelona, and has also spoken at Optimization Moscow, brightonSEO, Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Asia in Bangkok, Athens SEO and the Asia SEO Virtual Summit 2026, where his talk looked at how Baidu, Naver, DeepSeek, Tencent, Cốc Cốc and Yandex built their own AI answers.
Founder & Editor