Paris (AFP)
The historic leader of the French search engine Qwant, Eric Leandri, will leave the executive direction of the company but he remains a shareholder and will chair its strategic and scientific committee, we learned on Thursday from Qwant.
Qwant will also be recapitalized by Caisse des Dépôts and the German group Axel Springer, which already together hold at least 35% of the capital, according to cross-checks by AFP. The amount of this recapitalization, finalized at the end of February, has not been specified.
Jean-Claude Ghinozzi, the current deputy general manager in charge of sales and marketing, will chair and ensure the general management of the company. It will also have a governance council chaired by Antoine Troesch, from Banque des Territoires (Caisse des Dépôts group), according to Qwant and Caisse des Dépôts.
Eric Leandri, who remains one of the major shareholders of Qwant (150 employees), will take the chair of a strategic and scientific committee of Qwant, to "define the scientific and technological directions" of the company, according to a company press release.
Created in 2013 by private investors, Qwant belongs to the very closed world club of search engines, ultra-dominated by Google, but which also includes the American Bing (Microsoft), the Russian Yandex, the Chinese Baidu and the Korean Naver .
It works with its own algorithms to rake the web and social networks, and does not track the behavior of its users as Google does. The advertisements it displays are only linked to the words the user searches for, and not to previous searches or to the user's profile.
Qwant estimates its share of the French search engine market at more than 4%, but the Statscounter and Similar Web sites attribute it lower market shares, around 1%.
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