Sberbank bought Rambler: who benefits from it?
“Sberbank” became the sole owner of Rambler, having bought 45% of the company from Alexander Mamut. Last year, Sberbank bought the company’s shares for the first time, receiving 46.5% and subsequently increasing its share. Now Sberbank owns 100% of Rambler. Mikhail Tretyak, Head of IP / IT Practice Digital Rights Center believes that this purchase is another step towards the unification of Russian IT services in one structure:
“In this situation, we see a repetition of almost a carbon copy of the experience of China – it is there that the largest corporations are unofficially subordinated to the state, and without its knowledge and permission neither AliExpress nor Tencent would have existed, nor would they have been transformed into mega-corporations by buying up such assets. With the naked eye, it is clear that the Russian leadership is extremely impressed by the Chinese model of the absolute presence of the state in the business of IT companies, and especially in the field of control over citizens’ data. There is a lot of evidence of this – what is worth, in particular, the promotion in the information agenda over the past few weeks of the theory that “the digital ruble is good”, although its implementation will allow full control over any operations. This is indirectly confirmed by rumors that Tinkov refused to sell his banking business to Yandex because the data of large users of his products, who did not want this, would have been disclosed.
No matter how Sberbank positions itself as an independent market player, everyone has long understood perfectly well that without the consent of the “top” this deal would not have taken place. At the same time, in this transaction, Sberbank gets not only the opportunity to advertise its products, but also receive data from all users of services such as Rambler. Mail. Therefore, unfortunately, we are now seeing the transformation of Sberbank and Yandex into super-conglomerates with state participation, repeating the experience of China, and not the experience of the largest companies that have become such without the participation of the state, such as Google. “
Last year, Sberbank has already acquired such companies as Center of Speech Technologies, Rabota.ru, 2GIS and others.
