Russia's top Internet search engine to bid for U.S. messenger ICQ
Russia's largest Internet company Yandex may bid for the ICQ messenger, put up for sale by the U.S. company AOL, a respected business daily reported on Thursday.
ICQ, a popular instant messaging computer program with over 40 million users around the globe, largely in Russia, Germany, Israel and some East European countries, is estimated at over $200 million, Kommersant said.
Other bidders for ICQ, originally developed by the Israeli company Mirabilis and now owned by the New York-based AOL, include Russia's Digital Sky Technologies (DST) and its Mail.ru web portal partner Naspers from South Africa, Chinese Internet company Tencent Holdings Limited and the Czech Republic's largest web search engine Seznam, the paper said.
The information on Yandex joining the race for the ICQ messaging service was published on Tuesday by Trading Markets.
Yahoo was excluded from the bidder list as the U.S.-based online service giant made an offer lower than expected. Most bidders are prepared to offer about $200 million for ICQ, the paper said, referring to Trading Markets.
A Yandex spokesman neither confirmed nor dismissed information on the company's participation in the talks with AOL, saying "the company was satisfied with its current cooperation with ICQ," while AOL declined any comment, the paper said.
