Azernews.Az

By Bloomberg

Yandex NV, Russia’s largest search engine, forecast slowing sales growth after earnings fell in the first three months of the year as a weaker ruble inflated rental and personnel costs.

Yandex is targeting second-quarter revenue growth of 9 percent to 12 percent amid a challenging domestic economic environment, the company said Tuesday in a statement. First- quarter sales rose 13 percent to 12.3 billion rubles ($238 million).

Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization slid 12 percent to 3.57 billion rubles as Yandex’s dollar-linked expenses rose. That exceeded the average analyst estimate of 3.48 billion rubles for Ebitda.

Yandex is facing a general Russian economic slowdown and mounting competition from Google Inc. It filed a claim with Russia’s anti-monopoly service against its Mountain View, California-based rival in February, seeking to unbundle some Google services from devices using the Android operating system to allow vendors to pre-install its own search.

Yandex’s share of Russian Internet searches fell below 59 percent in the first quarter from more than 62 percent a year earlier, according to researcher LiveInternet. Google’s share rose to 33 percent from 27 percent.

In the first quarter, the Russian search engine saw rising labor costs and increased U.S. dollar-linked office rental expenses, according to the statement.