Geoffrey Smith 

Russia’s most important Internet company, Investment.com, warned Thursday night that it could default on its Dollar Bonds due to the suspension extended of its common stock. 

Yandex (NASDAQ): Operates search, ride-hailing, and other e-commerce services. Although it is legally domiciled in the Netherlands, and its shares are listed on Nasdaq, almost all its operations are located in Russia.

Investors have the right redeem their convertible notes with accrued interest if stock is suspended for more than five days, which was due to happen on Friday. 

The company is currently holding $1.25billion worth of such notes, minus accrued interests. However, it has only $400m in dollar liquidity. It will not be able to convert ruble liquidity into dollars due to restrictions imposed in the past two weeks.

Yandex released a statement saying that “The Yandex company as a group does not have sufficient resources currently to redeem all the Notes.” Yandex wouldn’t have enough resources to redeem the majority of the Notes if we weren’t able to distribute additional funds from Russian subsidiaries to the Dutch parent company.

According to the company, neither its executive nor it have been directly targeted by sanctions thus far. It also stated that it could still function normally under current conditions for up to 12 months. The suspension in Russia of Visa (NYSE 🙂 and Mastercard(NYSE 🙂 services this week will likely affect its ecommerce and ride-hailing businesses. It also acknowledged that the growing boycott of Russia from Western companies would affect its Market Place unit.

Yandex had a value of just $7 billion at its peak in November, when shares were stopped. Yandex was valued at over $30 billion when it reached its highest point in November.