10/05/2012 - Myclipp

The New York Times/ - Politics, Qua, 16 de Maio de 2012
CLIPPING INTERNACIONAL (Supreme Court)
A Russian Magnate’s Facebook Bet Pays
Off Big
MOSCOW — With his droopy eyeglasses and boxy
suits, Alisher B. Usmanov is at no risk of being
mistaken for a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. But the
Russian steel tycoon is poised to make billions of
dollars from the initial public stock offering of Facebook
this week — in the same league as many of that social
networking company’s early backers. Mr. Usmanov, an
industrial and media magnate who has demonstrated a
keen ability to take advantage of the opportunities that
appear in a financial disaster, is reaping the rewards of
an ambitious bet on Facebook made amid the global
economic recession in 2009. As other investors were
demanding tough terms, he said in an interview this
week, he and his Russian business associates were
willing to buy almost 10 percent of the company while
giving up the voting rights on those shares to
Facebook’s founder and chief executive, Mark
Zuckerberg. Now the Russian-led investments of less
than $900 million, made through two entities, Mail.ru
and Digital Sky Technologies, will be worth more than
$6 billion, based on the midpoint of the $34 to $38
price range that Facebook’s bankers have set for the
stock. Mr. Usmanov, 58, who got his start in the plastic
bag business and was reared in a remote part of the
Soviet Union, said he learned the benefits of acting
boldly during the ruble crisis of 1998. “I have a theory
of crisis that you must employ crisis to create
additional margin,” he said this week in a telephone
interview. “You need to understand when the moment
of growth is coming, and invest just before that.” Mr.
Zuckerberg turned to the Russian investors in 2009 at
a meeting quietly brokered by Goldman Sachs. Other
sources of financing had slowed because of the crisis.
And, because of the popularity of online social games
in Russia, investors here had a keen sense of the
value of social networking sites and were willing to pay
more than others for a stake in Facebook. The
Russians were also willing to accept another condition
important to Mr. Zuckerberg. Despite owning 10
percent of Facebook, they would get no voting rights or
seat on the board. They would also have no say in the
site’s policies on privacy or political organizing —
preserving independence that has become especially
important as Facebook has played a major role in
domestic politics in Russia. Mr. Usmanov, who is close
to the Kremlin, has not hesitated to use his media
properties to support the government. Last December,
he fired the publisher and editor at one of Russia’s
most respected newsmagazines, Kommersant Vlast,
after it published detailed accounts of bald falsification
in national elections. Mr. Usmanov said he fired the
executive not for the political coverage per se, but for
printing a picture of a ballot defaced with an obscenity
insulting Vladimir V. Putin, then prime minister of
Russia and now president. But Mr. Usmanov said the
Russian venture into Facebook was purely
commercial. “Americans started investing abroad after
100 years of capitalism at home,” he said. “We are
doing it after 20 years.” The precise details of the
Russian ownership in Facebook are difficult to assess.
The investments were made over two years though the
Russian Internet company Mail.ru and the investment
fund Digital Sky Technologies, also known as D.S.T.,
which is run by the venture capitalist Yuri Milner.
Although Mr. Usmanov was the leading backer, other
investors were involved. Mr. Milner met with
Zuckerberg in 2009 before the first investment, though
Mr. Usmanov has never met him. Mr. Milner said his
focus on social networking reflected insights gained
from watching the Russian Internet market develop in
the last few years. In 2005, D.S.T. began investing in
Internet companies in Russia and Eastern Europe,
where, as in parts of Asia, people took to social games
and the trading of virtual goods faster than in the
United States. The print media market was already
weak, a legacy of the Soviet breakup and political
controls on national newspapers, leaving a freer space
for crowdsourced media like social networks. Mr.
Milner said that this led to an understanding that social
networking business models involving tiny payments
from large numbers of users had vast potential in
emerging markets. “At the time, I was probably the
best-informed person in the world about social
networking monetization,” he said. Russia remains one
of the few major markets today where Facebook does
not dominate social networking, because of the
strength of local companies like VKontakte and Moi
Mir. (Other markets where Facebook is weak include
South Korea, where it is gaining, and China, where
government firewalls block the site because of its
potential to be used in organizing dissent.)Evelyn M.
Rusli contributed reporting from New York. Mr.
Usmanov said that, after the series of investments
from 2009 until 2011, he and Mr. Milner owned about 9
percent of Facebook at one point, but now own about
6 percent and will hold about 4.5 percent after the
initial public offering. The other shares they originally
controlled have gone to other investors, clients of
D.S.T. and corporate entities. Mr. Usmanov earned his
billions in the post-Soviet business world, managing
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