On October 23 and 24, Sochi Resort in Russia hosts a tremendous Russia - Africa Summit and Forum, attended by His Excellency President Vladimir Putin as well as high representatives of all African countries including H.E. Nana Akufo-Addo, the President of Ghana and other officials.

In his opening speech on October 23, Mr. Putin mentioned Yandex (parent company of Yango) for bringing up-to-date intelligent technologies from Russia to Africa.

Mr. Musheg Sahakian, Global Expansion Director for Yango was invited to the stage at the Economic part of the event. He started from sharing latest updates on Yango’s global expansion and success in general.

Yango and other services of Yandex.Taxi currently work in 18 countries, including Ghana and Ivory Coast. Over 700,000 drivers are working with the service on an active basis. Thanks to our technologies, drivers and partners benefit a lot - only in Russia, during the last two years they earned over 5 billion USD.

Mr. Sahakian stressed that good earnings for drivers together with affordable prices and high-quality service for users have been made possible due to the unique Yandex ecosystem of services (Search, Maps, Navigations, Artificial Intelligence, Voice Assistant and 90 others), which distinguishes it from its competitors.

“Russia is going back to Africa with a high-tech product. The quality of our IT solutions is seen in the fact that Russia is the only market where domestic internet services compete successfully with major global players in open competition,” stated Mr. Sahakian.

Yango always cares for the better present and future. Mr. Sahakian spoke about Yandex's self-driving cars which are currently being tested in several countries and already made 1,000,000 miles of driverless rides. These are ‘ideal drivers’: they never get tired or need to sleep, they obey rules and self-learn over millions of hours of driving experience.

And while the future is coming, and cars still need drivers, Yango pays great attention to the safety and security of rides. Yango’s technologies can automatically track speed and driving behavior can check how long a driver has been behind the wheel, automatically ban policy violators from the system, and even conduct technical and visual vehicle inspections.

What’s more, Yango’s own cameras can track a driver’s fatigue and attention analyzing their mimics and eye movement in a real-time mode.

“To sum things up, I want to just say again that we're focused on and care about Africa. We see a continent with tremendous potential and a great will to working with Russian companies. Here's to hoping this forum will help all of us start an even more productive dialogue,” said Mr. Sahakian in concluding his speech.