Dutch e-commerce company Prosus plans to exit Russia and is looking to sell Avito, its classifieds ads business in the country that analysts have valued at ~$6B
Context & Ripple Effects
Avito has been a decade-long build for the Naspers/Prosus group: a $1.2B majority-stake acquisition in 2015, then a $1.16B top-up in 2019 that took ownership above 99% and valued the classifieds leader at $3.85B. Analysts now peg it near $6B, making it Prosus' single largest Russian holding.
The planned Avito sale completes an unwind that began weeks earlier with the write-off of Prosus' $769M, 27% VK stake. The corpus shows where this ends: by October, Avito goes to Kismet Capital for about $2.46B — less than half its pre-invasion valuation.
First-order effects
- Prosus swaps its largest Russian revenue-generating asset for cash at whatever discount the sanctioned market forces, crystallizing losses on a business it had grown to a ~$6B analyst valuation.
- Avito's buyers and sellers face ownership by a domestic buyer, while Prosus' directors on Russian boards — following the VK resignations — lose their last operational foothold in the country.
Second-order effects
- The realized price becomes the reference point for every other Western holder exiting Russia: Yandex's own management-led buyout of its Russian business at ~$5.2B shows local buyers setting the clearing price, not pre-war marks.
- Prosus redirects capital toward non-Russian classifieds, and its marketplace arm OLX Group later agrees to acquire French auto-classifieds platform La Centrale for $1.3B — the same sector thesis redeployed westward.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Russia's consumer internet consolidates into domestic hands at distressed valuations, ending the era when Naspers-style foreign investors owned the country's category leaders.
- Exit discounts of this size push investors and auditors toward asset-level measurement of geopolitical exposure — valuing each country position separately rather than blending it into group multiples.
The trend: Western tech investors are unwinding their Russian portfolios at deep discounts to pre-invasion marks, transferring category-leading assets to domestic buyers.