Yandex buys food and grocery delivery service Delivery Club from VK

VK and Yandex signed binding documents on the deal.

VK will become the new owner of the Zen and Novosti content platforms and will transfer to Yandex the Delivery Club service for the delivery of ready meals and groceries, which VK is consolidating during the restructuring of O2O Holding (a joint venture between VK and Sberbank).

The parties plan to close the deal before the end of this year after receiving a series of regulatory approvals. After that, VK will receive the rights to the technologies and trademarks of the Zen and News services.

“Yandex”, as stated in his message, will leave the news aggregator and will develop ya.ru as his new home page. Once the transaction for the sale of media assets is closed, ya.ru will be the main point of entry to the company’s search, mail and other services, including the user’s personal Yandex ID account. The company will also launch a new Yandex application with Alice for Android.

The former Yandex Media Headquarters will become the dzen.ru portal after the deal closes and will come under the control of VK.

At the time of publication, the new Yandex homepage looks like this:

The name of the existing Yandex application for Android will be changed to Yandex Start. It will work as a browser and users will be able to select the home page in the settings. The Yandex app for iOS will work as before, but without Zen and News.

• In March, Yandex officially confirmed plans to sell Novosti and Zen services. However, the IT corporation later emphasized that the plans “are predictive in nature and many factors may affect the deal itself.”
• In April, VK signed an agreement to buy Yandex.News and Yandex.Zen.
• RB asked the experts how this could affect the subsequent work of the sites.