In a sign of its ambition to grow overseas, Russian internet group Yandex said on its website that it intends to open an office in Berlin to lure the technological expertise of Western Europe, Reuters reported.

Citing the announcement, the report said that by the end of this year, the new office will be hiring anywhere from 30 to 40 software engineers and user interface designers. They will be tasked with developing the worldwide version of the company's mapping service.

In its debut in New York in 2011, Yandex had said that one of the areas it will be focusing on is growing beyond former Soviet countries. The Russian firm has a market share of over 60% in Russia where it leads the world's largest search engine Google. Besides Russia, Yandex also operates in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Turkey. It also maintains developer offices in Switzerland and the US, the report said.

Yandex had started to increase the coverage of its mapping service last November to include Europe and the US. Nokia's Navteq unit which was recently rebranded as HERE powers the service. However, the maps still do not have the functions that are present in Russia, the report said.

In a press release issued on January 29, Yandex also revealed that it had inked a cooperation agreement with logistics services aggregator MultiShip. The Russian firm bought the company's software platform for $1 million and also poured several million into the development of the services aggregator. MultiShip provides internet stores with a simple way to take care of deliveries in the Russian Federation.

Earlier last month, Yandex also announced a partnership agreement with Facebook. The agreement would enable Yandex to have access to the public content from Facebook users in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. They will also be able to index data from CIS countries and Turkey after these have been published, a press release dated January 14 said.