Updated, 9:33 a.m. | LONDON - More than a year after Facebook’s botched initial public offering, investors are now reaping rewards.
On Thursday, the Russian Internet company Mail.ru, which is partly owned by the billionaire Alisher Usmanov, announced that it had sold its remaining stake in Facebook for around $525 million.
The Russian company initially bought its stake in Facebook in 2009 for around $200 million. Mr. Usmanov has also bought holdings in a number of other Internet start-ups in the United States, including the online game company Zynga and the daily deals Web site Groupon.
By selling its remaining 14.2 million shares, or roughly 0.7 percent of Facebook’s outstanding shares, Mail.ru is benefiting from a rebound in the share price, which fell when the company went public last year.
After pricing its shares at $38 for its I.P.O., Facebook shares dropped more than 50 percent in the first three months of trading, as investors feared the company was not prepared for the rise of consumers using their cellphones to surf the Internet.
A number of technical issues also hurt its share offering, including the failure of the trading systems at Nasdaq, where Facebook’s stock is listed.
Despite the initial problems, Facebook’s shares have risen about 125 percent in the last 12 months, partly on its increased push into the mobile sector.
Taking advantage of this rally, Mail.ru said on Thursday that it had sold its remaining stake during July and August. The Russian Internet company also had sold some of its shares during the I.P.O. last year.
Mr. Usmanov is one of Russia’s richest men, and his business interests include a holding in the Russian cellphone operator MegaFon. The sale of the Facebook stake comes as Mail.ru is expanding its own footprint in social networks and online games in its domestic market.
Mail.ru said on Thursday that its pretax profit for the first half of the year rose 26 percent, to 6.71 billion rubles (about $200 million).
The company’s early experience profiting from social networks in Russia led Yuri Milner, the investor who orchestrated the Russian pre-I.P.O. purchase of Facebook shares, to believe that Facebook and other Internet companies then mostly focused on the domestic American market could similarly profit while expanding abroad.
Mr. Usmanov still owns a large but undisclosed stake in Facebook through a separate investment holding, called D.S.T. Global. That company holds his shares in Zynga and Groupon as well as stakes in Twitter, Zocdoc, Spotify, Airbnb, Alibaba and 360buy.
Mr. Usmanov and other Russian investors at one point owned nearly 10 percent of Facebook, though precise details of their ownership stakes are difficult to assess. The investments were made over several years through D.S.T. Global and Mail.ru. D.S.T. Global is privately held and does not disclose the size of its investments.
Despite his large holding in Facebook, Mr. Usmanov and his Russian partners agreed early on to let Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, vote their shares and did not ask for a seat on the board. They also had no say in the site’s polices on privacy or political issues, preserving its independence as it played a major role in domestic politics in Russia.
Mark Scott reported from London and Andrew E. Kramer from Moscow.
