Yandex shareholders, led by Baring and Volozh, selling some shares, pricing Weds
MOSCOW. March 12 (Interfax) - A number of shareholders in Russian Internet company Yandex are selling more than 7% of the company's shares with a market value of approximately $600 million.
The company said the selling shareholders were BC&B Holdings, controlled by Baring Vostok, Belka Holdings Limited, affiliated with Yandex founder and CEO Arkady Volozh, Emerald Trust and Ilya Segalovich.
In total, the shareholders will sell 24.25 million Class A shares and the company itself will not receive any cash. The underwriters Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs have an over-allotment option for 2.425 million Class A shares.
Pricing takes place after the close of trading in the United States, in other words the early hours of Wednesday Moscow time, a source with knowledge of the deal told Interfax.
BC&B proposes to sell 18.18 million shares, Volozh's firm - 5.14 million, Emerald Trust - 727,200 and Segalovich - 203,600, all before the over-allotment option. All parties to the deal undertake not to sell shares for three months after the SPO.
Yandex has 221,981,842 Class A shares, 106,670,831 class B shares and 46,743,017 class C shares plus one priority share, which is owned by Sberbank .
The Class A shares carry one vote each and Class B shares 10, but they are automatically converted into Class A shares if sold. So total of 7.38% in Class A+B shares are being put up for sale or, including the option, 8.1%.
Yandex is currently trading at around $8.1 on the Nasdaq so the SPO could on that basis raise $600 million. Shares are usually sold in these deals at a discount, but the organizers have not yet said what that might be.
USM Holdings, controlled by Alisher Usmanov, sold 7.4% of Mail.ru Group at the end of February at a discount of 6.5% against LSE prices or for $532 million.
Yandex carried out an IPO on Nasdaq in May 2011 that valued the company at $8 billion. Only class A shares were placed on the exchange. Shares worth $1.3 billion were placed at the upper end of the price range, at $25 per share, in a heavily oversubscribed offering. The overall amount of the IPO reached $1.43 billion.
Yandex's largest shareholder is Baring Vostok, which owns nearly 35% of voting shares. Founders Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich own respectively 26% and 6.5% of voting shares. The Baring Vostok stake could fall to 27.3% as the result of the SPO.
Directors at Yandex have approved the purchase of 12 million Class A shares on the market, Yandex said. The buyback will not end before November 2013 and could be extended until March 2014. It will start as soon as the SPO has taken place.
