Ride-hailing giant Uber is yet again on the deal-making terrain, this time regarding its business in Russia. Such dealmaking of Uber selling and exchanging business assets has become a fixture for the company under the leadership of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who has led the company to offload most of its non-core businesses.

• This time around, Uber has agreed to sell part of its joint ventures in Russia to Yandex, the local tech giant that it partnered with in those ventures. Yandex will pay Uber $1bn in cash for Uber’s indirect stakes in their joint ventures covering self-driving cars and food and grocery deliveries.

• The payment is part of a restructuring that’ll lessen Uber’s joint ventures with Yandex and make the latter gain more control. Notably, Uber is retaining some other joint ventures with Yandex but the Russian tech giant has acquired the option to buy it out later for between $1.8-$2bn.

• If Yandex proceeds with its option to fully buy out Uber’s local ventures, it’ll be able to use the Uber brand in Russia and a few other countries till 2030. That’ll seem good for Yandex to leverage the global popularity of the Uber brand in its local markets.

• Yandex is Russia’s foremost tech giant, akin to the “Google” of Russia. Its core business is in fact a popular search engine that dominates over Google in Russia and the spoils of which the company has invested in many other internet businesses just like Google in the US.

• Yandex is a publicly-traded company on the American Nasdaq exchange (NASDAQ: YNDX). It has a market cap of around $27bn.

• Cashing out from some of its joint ventures, Uber will get $1bn in cash added to its coffers. That cash will come in handy in boosting the company’s core businesses of ride-hailing and food delivery in America and other countries, the core businesses that have been the company’s focus under Khosrowshahi’s leadership.

• Uber is still reeling from the effects of the Covid pandemic on its ride-hailing business which has dropped steeply from its peak. The company’s saving grace has been its Uber Eats food delivery business which rose sharply during the pandemic and tilted Uber towards good fortunes with shareholders.

• Nonetheless, Uber’s core businesses are still losing much money; it reported a $1.2bn loss from operations in the quarter ending June.

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