Russia’s Mail.Ru Group’s revenue rises 5% to 9 bln rbl in Jul–Sep

MOSCOW, Oct 26 (PRIME) -- The aggregate segment revenue of Russian Internet giant Mail.Ru Group increased 5% on the year to 9.127 billion rubles in July–September, the company said Wednesday in a statement.

In January–September, revenue grew 9.3% to 27.961 billion rubles.

The company’s revenue including the recently acquired mobile game developer Pixonic rose 9.4% to 9.620 billion rubles in July–September. Revenue spiked 12.7% to 29.074 billion rubles in January–September.

Net cash position was at 9.550 billion rubles as of 30 September.

“Advertising revenue growth remained strong in July–September with 21.3% on the year to 4.408 billion rubles with January–September growth of 25.9% to 12.506 billion rubles. The trends that we experienced in January–June are broadly unchanged and as we have previously commented the growing mobile audience and inventory as well as implementation of ad technologies are driving the shift of advertising budgets into mobile in which we are able to have good market share,” Chairman of the company’s board of directors Dmitry Grishin said.

“Native advertising remains strong across the social networks and this growth, especially on mobile allows us to mitigate the more negative trends in search revenue that is also included into our advertising revenue segment.”

“While there is no change with the Russian consumer we retain our 2016 like-for-like revenue guidance. Adding in Pixonic on a pro-forma basis we therefore expect to see 2016 revenue growth of around 10%. In the near term Pixonic is expected to be EBITDA neutral as we continue to invest in its business. As a result we would expect EBITDA margins on the higher revenue base on a pro-forma basis to be around 45% for 2016.”

Mail.Ru Group also announced some changes in management responsibility in order to focus more on strategy, international expansion and mergers and acquisitions.

“Boris Dobrodeyev, who was CEO of (social network) VKontakte and also head of strategy and development will now take responsibility for day to day operations as CEO (Russia). I shall remain with the company as chairman and fully involved,” Grishin said.

(62.0480 rubles – U.S. $1)

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