Recently, shares of the Russian mail resource Mail.ru began to fall following the shares of Facebook. In addition to them, a similar situation occurred with other assets of social networks. Experts argue that this is not accidental, and the cause-and-effect relationship can be traced quite clearly.
One of the most obvious reasons for the fall in stocks is the general mood of investors on the stock exchange. It's no secret that Facebook is a world-famous social network that occupies one of the leading positions. Therefore, to a certain extent, it is considered the benchmark company in its category. The financial setbacks of Mark Zuckerberg's company have provoked a negative attitude not only towards its shares, but towards all other securities in any way connected with social networks. As a result, stock market participants began to get rid of assets and sell shares not only of social networks, but of the entire Internet sector. Even those who had no serious reasons for this succumbed to these sentiments.
A less visible reason for this relationship between Facebook and Mail.ru shares is Russian businessman Alisher Usmanov. It is he who owns the largest stake in Mail.ru and a minority stake in Facebook. DST Global, which he owns with Yuri Milner, trades Facebook shares and took part in their IPO - an initial public offering on the stock market.
In addition, another factor also influenced the fall in shares of the Mail.ru postal system. Mail.ru has invested part of its funds in shares of foreign companies Groupon, Zynda and Facebook, which have also recently appeared among the stock market participants. The initial valuation of these investments was calculated based on the results of the IPOs of these companies. Now - from the real market price. As a result of this revaluation, the value of all foreign assets of Mail.ru fell by 22%.
However, DST Global has undertaken some restructuring of its overseas portfolio to remedy the current situation. A major step in this restructuring was the massive sell-off of Facebook shares. Experts hope that the income received from this operation will allow Mail.ru to get record profit in 2012 and publish a brilliant financial report to shareholders. In addition, the domestic postal system will get rid of the dependency between shares, which has brought it so much trouble.
