OREANDA-NEWS. March 12, 2012. Yandex (NASDAQ: YNDX), the Russian search giant, opens a sales office in Lucerne, Switzerland. The new office, headed by Bernard Lukey, formerly CEO of one of Russia’s largest online stores, OZON.ru, will serve the company’s fast-growing client base in Europe.

Yandex runs search sites along with a whole range of online services in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Turkey. In Russia, Yandex has about 60% share of the country’s search market (according to Liveintenet.ru). The company's new sales office in Lucerne was opened to work more efficiently with its advertising clients in Europe by presenting Yandex and its products to customers and training them on how to maximize their advertising opportunities on Yandex.

 “International sales have been growing fast over the past few years. We are launching our Lucerne sales office to build a closer relationship with advertising agencies and our clients in Europe,” said Alexei Tretiakov, Chief Commercial Officer at Yandex. “We are also keen to intensify our marketing-for-sales activities in Europe to attract new clients. We do believe that by launching this office we'll boost our European sales.”

Yandex offers a wide range of contextual and display advertising opportunities to clients interested in online-marketing in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan on its own web-sites, as well as on web sites across Yandex Advertising Network. Advertisers can manage their contextual campaigns via Yandex.Direct, Yandex's proprietary auction-based ad-serving system, available both in Russian and in English. The total daily audience of the ads served via Yandex.Direct exceeds 21 million (according to comScore, as of January 2012).

The Lucerne office is Yandex’s second office in Switzerland. Earlier this year, the company opened a development office in Zurich after hiring a group of highly skilled engineers.