YPG to Face New Toronto Competitor
Don’t have many details yet, but I did learn on Friday that Canadian Phone Directories, a PE-backed independent directory publisher in Canada, plans to launch a Toronto directory in competition with Yellow Pages Group, Canada’s dominant directory publisher.
CPD was formed last year after Hicks Capital acquired U.S. independent Phone Directories Corp.’s Canadian operation, installed new leadership (Olivier Vincent and John Rafferty, among others) and funded an aggressive expansion. So far, CPD has entered the Toronto market, expanded its Calgary operation and made two acquisitions — Yellow.ca and Osprey Media’s direction operations.
Toronto will be CPD’s biggest challenge. It is Canada’s largest market and one that YPG is likely to defend vigorously.
Charles, Ottawa is also a market where there are some new entrants after YPG shut down the ADS/SuperPages books. Given how competitive Toronto media is across all channels, pretty bold strategy what are they doing differently than ADS did?
I would offer a couple of thoughts. The old PDC business in Canada never invested enough to do this right, i.e., enough channel, distribution and promotion. Look at Calgary before and after HM bought CPD. Another idea which is harder to quantify, is that a competitive publisher has to have that mentality going in, that being an incumbent in one place and an independent in another is hard, without a very clear separation between the two. That said, if it were easy, it would have been done successfully already.