Russia's Yandex says it will buy Uber's stakes in their joint foodtech, delivery, and self-driving businesses in a $1B deal
Russian internet giant Yandex (YNDX.O) said on Tuesday it would buy Uber's (UBER.N) stakes in their joint foodtech, delivery and self-driving businesses …
Context & Ripple Effects
This buyout ends a partnership that began with the 2017 $3.7B ride-hailing joint venture, cleared by Russia's antitrust regulator that November, under which Uber took minority stakes across Yandex's ride-sharing, foodtech, delivery, and self-driving arms.
The direction was already set last year, when Yandex announced the spinout of its self-driving unit, buying out part of Uber's stake and committing $150M of new capital to the standalone company. Today's $1B purchase of Uber's remaining stakes in the foodtech, delivery, and self-driving businesses completes that separation.
First-order effects
- Uber takes $1B in cash and exits its remaining Russian joint ventures entirely, leaving Yandex with sole ownership and full strategic control of the foodtech, delivery, and self-driving businesses.
- Yandex no longer shares governance or splits economics with a minority partner, freeing it to set product and investment priorities across those three units unilaterally.
Second-order effects
- With Uber out as co-owner, Yandex has a clear path to consolidating Russian delivery assets — a direction it pursued by swapping its news aggregator and blog to VK in exchange for the Delivery Club food and grocery service.
- Uber redeploying the proceeds fits its broader pattern of concentrating on operations and autonomous bets outside Russia, such as its autonomous ride services in Zagreb and the Zipline drone-delivery partnership for Uber Eats.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the sprawling multi-business JV structure of 2017 gives way to single-owner national platforms, with Western partners monetizing stakes rather than managing shared governance — a logic that later extended to Yandex itself, which moved to sell its entire Russian business to management.
- Full ownership plus its own capital puts Yandex's self-driving unit on an independent development track, decoupled from US partner funding at a time of rising geopolitical friction around technology.
The trend: Cross-border tech joint ventures formed in Russia during the 2010s are being unwound into wholly owned domestic businesses, with Western partners exiting for cash and local players consolidating.