Arkady Volozh
Analyst · Renaissance Capital
Thank you, Greg, and thank you all for joining us today for our Q1 2013 earnings call -- conference call. We're very pleased with our first quarter results, marked by our strong financial metrics and a number of important products improvement. First, let me elaborate on our sales share. According to LiveInternet, our share of searches on all platforms, including mobile, in Q1 of 2013, was 61.6%, compared to 60.5% in Q4, it is an increase of 1.1% sequentially and 2.2% increase on year-over-year basis, which we think is significant. We are very pleased by the share gains that we are seeing, which comes despite aggressive promotional activity of our competitors and growing smartphone penetration. Share gains were driven by improvements to our search technology, growth in our share in the regions, increasing share on Chrome and Android and increasing adoption of our own Yandex browser. On top of the increases in fair share and growth in internet penetration, we also continue to benefit from increasing search intensity per user, and all these factors contributed to a 25% year-over-year increase in search result pages. Let me now spend a few minutes discussing some of the important products that we launched during the quarter. With our max products, we have broadened our coverage of small cities, enhanced the level of detail and edited new satellite imagery in panoramas in Russia, Ukraine and Turkey. We also significantly enhanced our churn-by-turn litigation product with a completely new and unique protein algorithm that incorporates our proprietary realtime traffic data in our highly accurate maps to get people to their destinations quickly. We estimate that an average Moscow driver using the new Yandex.Navigator will save over 55 hours per year in traffic jams. And we have been leveraging our existing maps products with users, such as Yandex.Taxi, which rapidly went from prototyping stage to launch and now to integration. This quarter, we continued the roll out of Yandex.Taxi service, which now services 6 cities, including the latest launch in St. Petersburg at the end of March. Here in this quarter, we also unveiled a new look for the Yandex homepage. In addition to a cleaner, more streamlined style, it has the added benefit of loading 50% faster than the previous version. We have been working on the new style of our homepage for over a year. It reflects a lot of iterations, careful AB testing and subtle enhancements. For example, we have made a concerted effort to make maps, news and email service more easily accessible directly from the home page. And we applied the same rigor to the redesign of ad placement on our search engine and result page. The major change consist of moving the ad from the right side of the page to the bottom of the results. The advertisements are still clearly separate from organic results. We began to roll this out to a portion of our users late in Q1 and subsequently, we deployed this on 100% of our search pages in the middle of April. While this change appears minor, it is showing extremely promising results, with significant increases in click-through rates and improvements in ROI for our advertisers. In addition to that, on March 28, we soft launched a new ad format, contextual ads with images, which will appear across the Yandex advertising network. Basically, this format allows our advertisers to add a small image to their x ad. Just like our regular database ads, these ads take full advantage of our targeting abilities and our understanding of the context. The image might be used to show a picture of the product that our advertisers are selling or their branding and logo or some other illustrations. While the sample size is still small, we've seen extremely promising trends in paid clicks. All in all, advertisers demand for this product have been extraordinary and we are looking to roll this out across our Yandex advertising network during this quarter. Now turning to Yandex.Market. It continues to grow at a faster rate than our overall revenues. In the last few days of March, we launched a ramped Yandex.Market application for Android. The application is designed both for smartphones and tablets, and has been extremely well-received, with over 1 million updates and 100,000 new installations since launch. And advancing Yandex.Market remains one of our top priorities for this year. In addition to the products I already discussed, we continue to make enhancements to our cloud storage for the [indiscernible] Yandex.Disk. In Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, we unveiled the Yandex application store and we also released the Yandex.Browser manager. That's for utilities that allows users to manage the default search engine and homepage in any of the installed browsers with just one click. During this quarter, we served over 226,000 as effective clients, text-based and displayed, which represents a 26% increase year-on-year compared to 22% increase in last quarter. Our continued focus on improving the ROI for our advertisers is contributing to this growth in their numbers. In conclusion, we're very pleased with our results this quarter. We posted very strong top line growth, thanks to the outstanding efforts of our dedicated team. And I'm very pleased to increase our annual revenue growth guidance from 28% to 32%, which we gave you last quarter to 30% to 35%, which we are giving you now. And with this, let me hand it over to Alexander, who will take you through the details of our financials.