There’s a new Russian joint venture called MF Technologies (MFT) which plans to address blockchain, IoT, and other digital services. The partners are telecoms company Megafon, Gazprombank, Rostekh state corporation, and mining and media conglomerate USM Group.
The group plans to build cross-industry blockchain projects but also mentioned creating digital financial platforms using Gazprombank’s expertise.
Gazprombank said “We continue to see opportunities to cooperate in the distribution of financial services for the users and in b2b solutions to the best interest of all partners of the joint venture. Any cooperation will be based on fully commercial terms.”
Some shuffling of interests created the joint venture’s funding. Megafon contributed 5.23% of Mail.ru to the joint venture which accounts for 58.87% of the company’s votes valued at $450m. Mail.ru is the largest internet group in the Russian-speaking world.
So the other three organizations are buying 55% of the shares in the joint venture for $247.5m. As a result, the split is 35% to Gazprombank, 9% to USM Holdings and 11% to Rostekh.
The common denominator in many of these organization is Alisher Usmanov. The billionaire’s primary vehicle is USM Holdings, and he has interests in Mail.ru Group, Megafon, and managed Gazprom for a decade.
According to Reuters, USM owns stakes in Alibaba, JD.com, Xiaomi, Uber, Spotify, Airbnb, Zalando, Flipkart, Ola Cabs, Didi Chuxing, ZocDoc, and Klarna.
Mail.ru controls social network VKontakte whose CEO was Pavel Durov until shortly after Mail.ru gained a controlling stake. After his departure, Durov founded Telegram which recently raised $1.7bn in an institutional ICO.
