Charity from "Yandex", imaginary or real? Understanding

Hello.

Relatively recently, Yandex released a report on the activities of the Help

side by side”, listing achievements for 2022year. I have mixed feelings about both the numbers and what Yandex is doing in this regard. As my friend, who has been involved in charity work for a long time, said, “Let them do it better than nothing. People get help, and the fact that they profit from it, so God will be their judge. I talked with different people, but it turned out that most people do not have an understanding of how Yandex supports charity. I will try to talk about this in this text, despite the fact that the topic is painful for everyone without exception, and the same NGOs will stand up as a wall in defense of Yandex, as they receive bonuses from the fund, and everything else does not bother them.

Let's start with simple basics, in Russia since 2020 againthere is a tax deduction for legal entities if they participate in charity. There is a list of non-profit organizations approved by the state, transferring money to them or providing services, you receive a tax deduction. You can spend no more than 1% of the company's revenue, and today these expenses are deducted as expenses before tax. State support is important here, it encourages companies to participate in charity, this is a bonus that encourages them to do good deeds.

Hereinafter, I will quote excerpts from the Yandex Charitable Foundation, all these texts can be found here.

How does the Yandex Charitable Foundation work?Finds partners in the face of NGOs, checks them to ensure that they meet the criteria, primarily the possibility of a tax deduction. Then such NGOs can receive grants, for example, for taxi rides from Yandex.

Yandex says they don't charge commissions forcharity trips and also earn nothing. Trips are carried out in the "Economy" tariff or in cars supported by people with disabilities. Today Yandex.Taxi has more than one hundred thousand drivers who can make such trips.

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The first thing to take into account, "Yandex"spends money only within the perimeter of the company, that is, the grants issued are aimed at loading their own services - taxi, market, contextual advertising, digital solutions. For example, in 2022, there were 381,730 taxi rides paid for by the Yandex Charitable Foundation.

In fact, this is an extension of all company metrics,increasing the number of users of the company's services, buying their goods and services from themselves. A closed loop that is not financed by the company at all, but by users who give money to charity. The easiest way to take this money is to turn on account rounding. In Yandex applications, the fund button is in the menu.

Previously, Yandex did not just offerrounding, but promised for every ruble invested by you, to add a ruble from yourself. Now this practice has been abandoned, the company monthly invests 12 million rubles in the fund from itself. Over the past year, 230 thousand people turned on rounding, in total 808 thousand Yandex users have rounding. During the year, 177 million rubles were collected due to rounding, plus Yandex itself added 144 million rubles, if you follow their statement, in reality the amount is somehow less.

Basically, the expenses go to taxis, this is the main thing, forsecond place goods. And here we come to the most curious thing in this story - the management of the expenses of a charitable foundation. In Yandex, they load up the same taxi service, form trips at the expense of users (they don’t take a commission from the service, which is true). But this is a business problem that can be solved with zero investment. In fact, "Yandex" buys the service itself from itself, using NPOs to which it issues funds. The company does not incur any expenses, the funds invested by Yandex are a minimum, this is a subsidy, which Yandex constantly does as part of the promotion. The cost of trips is exactly the same, there are no discounts, the average price is 500 rubles for 25 cities where this service operates. In March 2023, Russian Standard Bank published a study of the average cost of a taxi in Moscow, it amounted to 363 rubles. It’s hard for me to believe in these figures, the December 2021 report from Tinkoff Data is closer, which states that the average price is 520 rubles. But in any case, these figures indicate that Yandex does not have any meaningful discount for social taxi rides, the average value in the market or even higher, it's a matter of which data you trust.

You can delve into the numbers further, but the mainthe idea here is simple: Yandex uses charity as a tool to increase the load of its own services, does not lose any money on this, in fact does not donate anything, all this is shifted to the shoulders of people. The ideal mechanism for pumping money.

And here the question arises, because NGOs receive moneyand help people, it's impossible to deny? That's right, NGOs do receive grants and use them to help people, but there is no charity from Yandex, it's help collected by people, a fund that works at someone else's expense. And this is the reason why I don’t use rounding from Yandex, it’s easier to transfer money directly to one or another fund that I know and trust. This is a personal matter, what to do, whether it is necessary to support such funds and trust them. I won't urge you to do one way or the other. In my opinion, charity is an important part of our life.

Charity in reading "Yandex" iszero costs and a maximum of public goodies, when people do not think about where the money comes from and where it is spent. Why I don’t like it, obviously, and it’s not about Yandex, it could apply to any company that would do the same. In the first quarter of 2023, Yandex received a net profit of 5.7 billion rubles.

How much did the company donate to charity?in Russia? De facto zero of this profit, not a single penny. The expense deduction took place before the above, and it also cost the company nothing. And this is an open secret for the market, which is hidden from those who donate to the development of the company.

I have mixed feelings about thisstories. It is good that NGOs receive money, there is no doubt about it, they act for good. But the bad thing here is that Yandex has created a perpetual motion machine, in which it does not sacrifice anything, but rather earns trips, customers for its services, and increases their attractiveness. Benefits from people's urge to help loved ones. I don't like it at all. Although, perhaps, I have the wrong guidelines and you explain that this is how it is necessary, but it cannot be otherwise.

P.S.If Yandex had not sent me another report on charity, I would have passed by this topic, but I could not restrain myself, although I thought for a long time whether it was worth it. But still, it seems that it is necessary to talk about such things, I do not have a definite answer as to how good or bad it is.

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