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Comment by techinformed56 | Hacker News Reader

If you read other articles you can see that Uber spent 170M in Russia till now. Along with this 225M its a total 395M of spending. And now they got 36.6% stake in a company (now a leader in Russia) worth 3.4B. So Uber got 1.4B. How is that not coming out with anything? Uber did same thing in China. While we all think they lost in China, Uber seems to have spent around 2B or so but got away with close to 8B stake in Didi (leader in China). Any investor will be happy with those returns.

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They own a minority stake in an entity that has to pay Yandex for infrastructure, licensing rights and advertising which Yandex controls.

So this entity racks up a lot of debt (to Yandex) while making transfer payments to Yandex and then in a few years: "whoops, bankrupt!"

Now the equity holders (Uber) get wiped out and the company re-organizes and sells its assets (to Yandex) to pay off its debts (to Yandex) and Uber gets nothing.

Oh, NO! That's not legal! That's not fair! Good luck in Russian court buddy.

They are losing everything. They are burning another $225M to forestal the inevitable and pretend like it is not a complete loss but it is only a matter of time.

Yandex.taxi is a service provided by Yandex. The deal talks nothing about licesing agreement for Yandex infrastructure (maps etc). So the claim you make above is under premise that ride sharing will not make money at all and money spend on infrastructure will be far more than what ride hailing can generate. So if this assumption is wrong then we are in different argument on whether ride hailing is a sustainable business at all. Every investor is investing hoping ride hailing will be a profitable business. If it is then this combined entity has more to gain than lose.

I am not saying that the business is not profitable. I am just saying that Yandex is going to take it all.

If Yandex can take Uber's stake, which is worth billions as you say, they would be stupid not to, and they can, so they will.

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