Unlocking PagesJaunes’ Value

Reports circulated over the weekend that France Telecom is considering selling off the 54 percent it owns of PagesJaunes Groupe. PagesJaunes is among the best Yellow Pages assets in the world. It has had the great advantage of learning from Minitel (perhaps the world’s first online Yellow Pages) and using that knowledge to evolve its current www.pagesjaunes.fr site. Among the most impressive metrics is that nearly 70 percent of PagesJaunes’ print advertisers are also online — certainly the envy of print Yellow Pages publishers around the world. We’d expect France Telecom to see strong interest in this very valuable property.