New York (AFP) – Yandex, the Russian IT behemoth, warned on Thursday that it may default on its debt after its suspension from trading on the New York Stock Market’s digital stock exchange.
This week, Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange took down all of the Russian companies that were on their exchanges. They wanted to know how US and other sanctions against them might affect them.
Yandex, which is based in the Netherlands but has most of its business in Russia, said in a statement released Thursday that it was not the target of the penalties.
“At the moment, there are no regulatory prohibitions on US, UK, or EU residents acquiring and trading in Yandex’s shares,“ it noted.
Because of its size and wide range of services, the company is sometimes called “Russian Google.” It said that if it isn’t allowed to trade for more than five days, holders of certain bonds would be legally entitled to get interest on their debt.
“As a whole, the Yandex group does not presently have the resources to fully redeem the notes,“ the business said.
Even if Yandex were able to acquire funding to pay them in full, the business said that such a significant expenditure would “have a major detrimental impact on our short-term financial situation and liquidity and may impair our ability to satisfy our other commitments.”
The business noted that it was examining its financial alternatives.
In response to an AFP query, Nasdaq said that the Yandex listing “remains suspended.”
Yandex earned around 356 billion rubles ($4.77 billion at the December exchange rate) in 2021.
According to the firm, its search engine, which began in 1997, is the biggest of its type in Russia, accounting for more than 60% of the country’s internet searches in the fourth quarter of 2021.
In the last few years, the business has added more products to its line. It now has a taxi-hailing service and a food delivery service.
