OREANDA-NEWS. April 26, 2012. Mail.Ru Group Limited (LSE: MAIL, hereinafter referred as "the Company" or "the Group"), one of the largest Internet companies in the high-growth Russian-speaking Internet market, today releases its annual report for 2011 and provides the following final audited segment financial information for the year ended 31 December 2011 and an update on the preliminary unaudited segment revenues for Q1 2012.

Performance highlights
Q1 2012 Group aggregate segment revenue grew Y-o-Y 45.0% to USD 160.3m. On a ruble basis, the Y-o-Y growth was 49.9%

–      Community IVAS was the key growth driver delivering 103.9% growth
Monthly audience(TNS Russia) of Mail.Ru portal in March 2012 reached 32.7m Russian users

–      Continued growth in social networking and instant messaging with Odnoklassniki (“OK”) reaching 25.3m monthly users (TNS Russia) and Mail.Ru Agent at 25.5m monthly users
Final audited segment results for FY 2011 slightly above the preliminary trading statement

–      Group aggregate segment revenue at USD 515.4m, Group aggregate segment EBITDA at USD 282.9m, Group aggregate segment net profit at USD 208.6m compared to USD 514.9m, USD 282.8m and USD 207.6m respectively reported on February 24, 2012

Key Recent Developments

Email & Portal
Launch of a new version of Mail.Ru main page – modern, lightweight and significantly faster
Release of email mobile application for iOS
Launch of Mail.Ru Hub for Windows Phone 7. The application is a mobile version of Mail.Ru portal and represents a single entry point to our key vertical projects

Instant Messaging
Release of the first mobile clients for Windows Phone 7 (Mail.Ru Agent, ICQ) and Bada (ICQ)
Release of ICQ version 3.1 for Android featuring photo and location sharing
Release of Mail.Ru Agent version 5.10 for Windows featuring in-house voice & video engine and further integration with Odnoklassniki (posting statuses to and receiving alerts from the network)
We completely removed display advertising on ICQ in Russia and CIS

Social Networks
OK introduced an enhanced privacy settings tool
New features in OK mobile applications: music (iOS) and videochat (Android)
Launch of video uploads in OK
New registration guide in My World

Games
Launch of Warface, MMO first person shooter
Several launches of in-house developed social and mobile games

Search and E-commerce
Release of search application for Android featuring voice search
Money@Mail.Ru enabled users to top up accounts directly from Beeline numbers

Other
Launch of the second annual Russian-speaking developer contest, Russian Code Cup 2012, with finals in Q3
Held Technology Forum of Mail.Ru Group, an IT-conference where industry experts shared their knowledge and experience in developing and supporting high-load IT systems, etc.
Opened new office in Volgograd

Commenting on the results of the Group, Dmitry Grishin, Chairman and co-founder of Mail.Ru Group, said:

“We are very pleased to report our final IFRS audited results for 2011 and continued strong revenue performance in Q1 2012.

In Q1 2012, Mail.Ru Group achieved Group aggregate segment revenue Y-o-Y growth of 50% on a ruble basis. Key drivers of our monetization remained Community IVAS and online advertising.

We continued to work on improving our products. We launched a new version of our main page – now it is significantly lighter and faster for a better user experience. This is an important milestone as the main page serves as an entry point for significant part of our users and drives traffic to other products. Our mobile development efforts advanced further with the launch of an iOS application for email, new versions of our instant messengers across mobile platforms as well as enhancements to mobile versions of OK. We are also actively re-tuning our online games business and the strategy starts paying off as Y-o-Y growth in MMO games in Q1 2012 improved compared to Q4 2011. Notably, we launched Warface, a very high-quality AAA first person shooter – we are currently focused on driving user engagement in Warface and early signs are encouraging.

We have started the year well, and despite an uncertain global economic outlook, the underlying market remains supportive and the structural drivers of our business are unchanged. As a result we reiterate our full year 2012 guidance of 35% y-o-y constant currency revenue growth and EBITDA margins of around 50%.”

Conference call

The Mail.Ru Group management team will host an analyst and investor conference call at 18.00 BST UK time (21.00 Moscow time, 13.00 U.S. Eastern Daylight Time), on Thursday 26 April 2012, to discuss details of the Company’s performance and certain forward-looking information. The conference call will include a Question and Answer session.

To participate in this conference call, please use the following access details:

Confirmation Code:  71285332

Participant Toll Free Telephone Numbers: 
 

From Russia 8108 002 178 2044

From the UK  0800 694 1562

From the US  1866 245 0744

International +44 (0) 1452 583 043