It has been over one year since Russia invaded Ukraine. Throughout that year, Match Group (NYSE: MTCH) has continued to allow its products to operate within the market. Recently, along with their quarterly earnings, Match announced that they will be slowly pulling out of the Russian market. They believe they will fully exit by June 30th 2023. Out of all Match, products Tinder is most likely to suffer the most from this.
Interestingly enough, Tinder’s arch-competitor Bumble made a quick decision to remove its apps from Belarus and Russian apps stores in Q1 of 2022.
It is now being rumored that Russian social media platform, VKontakte (ВКонтакте and ВК in Russian), or VK for short, is developing a rival app to fill the void.
Our take
It is unclear what spurred the decision by Match to do this at this time. Early in the war, many consumer companies such as McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Starbucks and Heineken all pulled out and ceased operations in Russia. While it was a pressured situation for many brick & mortar or physically operating companies, the digital operation space isn’t so straightforward. Match Group, like many other tech companies, lives nearly 100% online. There are no significant presence that the average person would see. It seems like the decision to persist in the market was revenue related as Russia is a sizeable market. However, perhaps with the recent announcements, particularly the condemning of Vladimir Putin by the International Criminal Court, may have triggered this response.
Interestingly, at least on a superficial level, Russian companies have reacted swiftly to any voids created by foreign companies leaving the market. It became a sense of pride, even culminating in a public display of defiance. ZAMESTIM, they say, “we will replace”. Let’s see.
Should there be success, there’s likely to be some small ripple effects in the greater Russian-speaking world, particularly where support for the Russian government is still strong or where access to software in the Russian language is important. We don’t expect much, but any new developments here may also impact Central Asia to a degree like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan.
We’ll keep you posted on updates here as we hear them. Sign up to our newsletter so you don’t miss any of the latest news in the dating world.
-TWOD team