Russia's Google

Following my blog on the Genzym experience last week, today I’d like to introduce you a gem from Russia. As I predicted a few weeks ago, I thought the Wall Street was again overacting to the Ukraine situation and because of this, the Russian stocks overall were crashed. People were simply dumping everything related to Russia. I suggested you could buy the Russian oil company, Gazprom (OGZPY). If you did so, you should be happy that in short few weeks, OGZPY has already been moving up nicely over 20% (from $7 to $8.45 now).

If you are willing to consider more Russian stocks, then I have something that I’m very interested in. One of them is Yandex (YNDX). Yandex is the Google in Russia or Baidu in China. While the majority of you probably have not heard of it, YNDX is actually the 4^th largest search engine in the world. Understandably, its market share in Russia in the search engine business is in the overwhelmingly leading position at 60%. In the contrast, Google, the world’s largest search engine has only a 25% market share. You can bet, with this kind of leading role in Russia, Yandex has expanded its business to cover all kinds of areas in the e-business you can think about, including e-mail service, e-commerce portal, auction-based advertising site, navigator service, and various mobile products. I don’t need to go into details but suffice to say, financially it is doing very well and strongly. In terms of various financial indicators, Yandex has shown 30-50% increases as compared with its last year performance. In a nutshell, it is growing really fast. Same as other Russian stocks in general, YNDX got crashed a couple of months ago from its peak of $45 down to $24 in April. Well, the April low looks like its rock bottom now. It has since bounced back fiercely and gained back almost all its loss of this year. Based on its solid fundamentals and the very bright prospects in the future, I think YNDX is still cheap at this price. Of course, keep in mind, anything related to Russia will be volatile. It won’t be surprised to me to see some stupid overreaction again to some headline crisis for Russia causing another major sell-off again. Simply ignore the noises and go against the herd! Unless you think the Russian people will stop using Internet or mobile applications due to whatever reasons, in the long run, I think the fundamentals will trump. YNDX is a good buy for me right now and a strong buy if some sell-off occurs later.