Yandex changes Zen and News services to Delivery Club

VK announced the purchase of the Novosti and Zen services from Yandex and a deal to transfer the Food Delivery Club service to Yandex. How this will turn out for users, Moskovskaya Pravda found out.

According to VK, the binding documents on the deal have already been signed.

“According to the terms, VK will become the owner of the Zen and News content platforms and transfer to Yandex the Delivery Club service for the delivery of ready-made food and groceries, which VK is consolidating during the restructuring of O2O Holding, a joint venture between VK and Sberbank,” – says in the message of the press service of VK.

The final completion of this transaction is planned to be carried out before the end of the year. The asset swap will require approval from the Federal Antimonopoly Service.

“After the closing of the transaction, VK will receive the rights to technologies and trademarks of the Zen and News services,” VK specified.

The services will be hosted on the dzen.ru portal. Moreover, they will be available in both desktop and mobile versions. VK assures that the authors of Zen will have access to a wider audience and will be able to develop their publications in new formats.

“We highly appreciate the results achieved by the Zen team, and we consider it right to give the team the opportunity to develop independently. This will allow us to bring new content products to the market faster and more efficiently and improve existing ones, increasing the audience,” said VK CEO Vladimir Kiriyenko.

In turn, Yandex announced that they were abandoning the news aggregator and would develop a new page, ya.ru, which is already available in test mode. Outwardly, it resembles the main page of Google.

Zen and News services will become available at dzen.ru after the deal is closed. Other services and the Yandex search string will also be placed there.

According to the press service of Yandex, after the deal for the sale of Zen and News is closed, the ya.ru page will become the main entry point for users to Search, Mail and other services.

“The company will also release a new Yandex application for Android with Alisa,” the message says.

In addition, in the company clarifiedthat after the acquisition of Delivery Club they will retain the name of this service, and its application and website will continue to work as before. Users, according to the company’s specialists, will only become more convenient. After the completion of the Delivery Club and Yandex. Food” will be combined on a single technological platform, so that restaurants will be able to expand the delivery area, couriers will be able to take orders for delivery from one and the other service, which will allow them to fulfill more orders and, accordingly, earn more. And service users will receive their orders faster.

Expert opinion

Mark Goykhman, Chief Analyst at TeleTrade, commented on the upcoming deal between Yandex and VK to Moskovskaya Pravda:

Each of the participants in the transaction gives away businesses that are not core for him. A receives ownership of those assets in which it has a higher interest.

After all, initially it so “spontaneously” turned out that these directions were “mixed” within the ecosystems of these giants during their formation. But in a crisis, the complication of working conditions, the compression of consumer incomes and the increase in costs dictate the need to optimize structures and costs.

So what will be the result? VK will give back the food delivery service Delivery Club received after the “divorce” and “division of property” with Sberbank. For a media communication holding, this is clearly a non-core area. But in return, he will receive from Yandex the Zen and News services that are quite appropriate for his specialization. For VK, this is an expansion of activities, content and audience coverage, but within the main contour of its work.

Finally, Yandex, as an IT company and aggregator of various services, by giving away media assets that are not quite core for it, gets a former strong competitor – Delivery Club. After all, in the confrontation with Yandex.Food, they are often called “Montagues and Capulets.” Thus, the rivalry will stop, and Yandex will have considerable preferences from this. Namely, an additional huge client base, logistics services, opportunities to save on organization and overhead costs due to business scaling, no need to “look back” at a powerful competitor.

Thus, each of the participants receives his own. In general, this is a plus for their businesses. However, with such “tectonic shifts” there is a possibility of strengthening monopolization in these areas, reducing the number of “players”. For the giants, this is good, but for consumers, there are risks of worsening service conditions, higher prices and a decrease in the quality of services.

Therefore, within the framework of the transaction, which is planned to be completed before the end of 2022, special attention should be paid to compliance with antitrust laws and regulatory requirements. The agreement must be approved by the relevant government authorities to prevent negative consequences for end users.

Alena Bodrienko.

Moskovskaya Pravda collage