It's nothing new to observe that big markets are disproportionately important to Yellow Pages publishers and that they are often the most in distress. The recent spate of nine-month conference calls among European directory publishers has reinforced this point and…
Interesting Q&A with SBC CFO Richard Linder in the latest issue of BusinessWeek. He discusses the possibilities for selling advertising on IPTV using the directory sales force. It's an indication of the strategic importance SBC is placing on its Yellow…
Here is one item of interest from our notes of Dex Media's recent third-quarter earnings conference call. Dex President and CEO George Burnett was asked how the publisher planned to monetize the traffic it is buying for its Dex Online…
The Spanish publisher Telef³nica Publicidad e Informaci³n (TPI) has expanded its presence in South America with the acquisition of Telinver, Argentina's largest directory publisher. The enterprise value of the deal was US$74 million. TPI already owns the market leaders in…
Canada's Yellow Pages Group is working with magazine publisher Transcontinental Media to publish home improvement guides that combine magzine-like editorial with directory information. YPG's Ezana Raswork talked about this initiative at our recent DDC2005 conference. Transcontinental will provide the content…
Here are some interesting items we've come across in the European search and directory world:* Eniro has announced a partnership with Internet telephony player Skype to include Skype addresses in Eniro's online database of names and numbers. Skype is launching…
The French directory publisher PagesJaunes issued its third-quarter and year-to-date figures today. The highlights include a 3.1 percent print growth rate in France through the first nine months of 2005 and a 13.5 percent online growth rate for the same…
Interesting article in USA Today yesterday on BellSouth and its reluctance to jump into the M&A game as aggressively as SBC and others have. The article recounts how, after the wireless company Cingular acquired AT&T's wireless business, SBC CEO Ed…
Here at the Association of Directory Publishers conference in Huntington Beach, CA, the mood seems upbeat and the independent publishers in attendance see blue skies ahead for their businesses, which offer competitive Yellow Pages directories, primarily in the United States.…
Ran into Jonathan Blue of Cobalt Publishing at the ADP conference last week. He pointed out that his company, which publishes Spanish-language directories under the Enlace (Spanish for Link) brand, has moved into its largest market to date by acquiring…
Speaking at a recent "investor day" event in Canada, Yellow Pages Group CEO Marc Tellier urged the national government to go easy on the income trust model, which has become a popular tax-advantaged ownership structure in Canada. Tellier is clearly…
Interesting article in the San Francisco Chronicle about how some advertisers and competitors are responding to the growth of companion books. The article suggests SBC's use of companions as a competitive weapon against its rival Valley Yellow Pages may be…
At the recent Directory Driven Commerce conference, Ezana Raswork of Canada's Yellow Pages Group gave a presentation detailing how YPG has phased out the inclusion of paid advertising on its directories' front covers. Part of the logic is that the…
Swedish publisher Eniro has been very consistent in pursuing its strategy of shedding assets in small, emerging Eastern European markets so management can focus on making the company the biggest and best publisher in the Nordic markets. To this end,…
Yellow Brick Road (YBR), the European directories holding company, has come out on top in bidding for Denmark's TDC Directories, the latest publisher to split off from a parent telecommunications company. The purchase price was 650 million euros. YBR, itself…
This just in, R.H. Donnelley has acquired Dex Media for equity of $4.2 billion and debt assumption of $5.3 billion, for a total value of $9.5 billion, a multiple of roughly 10 times Dex's 2004 EBITDA. Current RHD CEO Dave…
We just completed DDC2005 in Denver, and while I may be a little close to the subject, I feel it was one of the better DDC events in recent memory. I don't credit TKG for this as much as the…
The Swedish publisher Eniro AB is buying its Norwegian rival Findexa A/S for a combination of cash and new shares worth roughly 7.9 billion Swedish kroner (about US$1.01 billion). The deal will further strengthen Eniro's position in the Nordic market,…
We noted several stories last week that reported Universal McCann's longtime ad forecaster Bob Coen had downgraded his 2005 U.S. advertising outlook, which was issued in December 2004. The revised outlook calls for U.S. total advertrising growing by 5.7 percent…
The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that RH Donnelley is in talks to acquire Dex Media, an acquisition that would propel RHD into the third position in the US directories market, behind SBC and Verizon, ahead of BellSouth and…
