Vkontakte’s IPO “postponed indefinitely;” shareholder Mail.ru Group yields control to founder

“No IPO is being planned. Facebook’s IPO has destroyed the trust of many individual investors in social networks, so [our] IPO is postponed indefinitely,” Vkontakte’s founder and co-owner Pavel Durov tweeted on Monday, answering a Russian journalist’s question. Durov had expressed his IPO intentions a mere five months ago at the DLD tech conference in Munich.

In a separate move, Mail.ru Group – the LSE-listed Russian Internet giant which owns a 39.9% stake in Vkontakte – announced yesterday that it has decided to yield control of the company to Durov by offering him the voting rights on its shares.

The move gives Durov, who personally owns a 12% stake, the absolute majority of voting rights in the company he founded.

Mail. Ru Group, which also owns a stake in Facebook, already has a similar agreement in place with Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg, Russian business daily Vedomosti noted.

The move appears to be a cease-fire or reconciliation after a tumultuous relationship betweeen Vkontakte’s founder and Mail.ru Group. Last summer, while Durov was resisting the latter’s ambitions to take control of Vkontakte, he referred to Mail.ru Group as a “trash holding,” and later accused its ad sales teams of “massive bribery.”

With nearly 170 million registered users, Vkontakte.ru is the leading Russian-language social networking site. In March 2012, the site attracted more than 29 million users from among the inhabitants of large Russian cities aged between 12 and 54, TNS reported.

Topics: Capital markets, Finance, Internet, News, Social networks & apps, Venture / Private equity
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