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Secondary Offering Doesn’t Outweigh Cash for Russian Search Engine

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Russia’s largest search engine, Yandex N.V. (NASDAQ: YNDX), announced a secondary offering of more than 24 million shares after markets closed last night, and the stock promptly fell 8%. But all is forgiven this morning.

The offering included only shares from some of the company’s largest shareholders, and Yandex did not share in the proceeds. The share price slide failed to take into account Yandex’s cash hoard of nearly $1 billion, which several analysts were quick to point out. At least one analyst thinks that Yandex will use some of that cash for a special dividend.

Yandex stock is essentially flat to its price of a year ago, while shares of Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) are up 53% and Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) shares are 30% higher. Only China’s Baidu Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU) of the major search engines/portals is down. As of mid-February, Yandex searches outnumbered searches on Bing, the search engine from Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), and the Russian service became the world’s fourth largest search provider.

The price target for Yandex is around $31 and shares are trading at $23.52 in the first half hour this morning, after last night’s nosedive. The 52-week range on the stock is $16.65 to $28.14.

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