February 3, 2014. In 2014, Yandex is planning to almost double its R&D office in Yekaterinburg in size, the company’s representative in Ural Federal District Pavel Kozlov announced at a press conference.

He pointed out that Yekaterinburg has great cadre potential. He feels there are a lot of talented people here.

‘We are not expanding for reasons of profit. It would actually be more convenient for us to have all the people working in one city, Moscow. However, the other parts of Russia are very rich in gifted people who do not wish to leave their hometowns and their places of residence,’ he explained.

Yandex set up its Yekaterinburg office in 2007. There are currently 147 employees working there, they are busy developing Yandex.Market and a desktop browser. It was in Yekaterinburg where Yandex.Taxi, Yandex.Schedule, and Yandex.Showbill were developed.

This year, five local experts created Winter Games 2014, a project dedicated to the Sochi Olympics coverage. It took them some five months to develop the service.

‘The project is capable of handling an extensive workload of up to 1 million users at a time. The service is targeted at the users from Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Kazakhstan,’ Kozlov said.