New Zealand’s Yellow Pages Group had named current Managing Director Chris Armistead as its new CEO, replacing Scott Pomeroy, who held the job on an interim basis. Pomeroy, formerly CEO of Local Insight Media, will remain on the company’s board of directors.

Armistead is an international Yellow Pages veteran, having worked at AT&T (BellSouth), Sensis, and Truvo. At the latter, Armistead served as country manager for the Netherlands and Portugal. At both Sensis and Truvo, Armistead worked with Andrew Day, who ran both Sensis and Truvo and is now chairman of Yellow Pages Group NZ.

Armistead has been with Yellow NZ for a year and has been instrumental in developing Yellow’s three year digital transformation plan, which involved changing the company into a digital marketing services provider for New Zealand businesses.

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2010 was a dismal year for the New Zealand branch of Deutsche Bank after exposure to the Yellow Pages Group restructuring. The KPMG Financial Institutions Performance Survey issued last week shows that Deutsche ranked at the bottom out of 10 New Zealand branch banks on key measures, including a $53 million loss for the financial year, a 162 percent fall from the previous year’s profit and a negative 37 percent return on equity.

Local Chief Executive Brett Shepheard declined to comment on the deterioration specifically, but in a written statement to www.stuff.co.nz said that “the 2010 result was effected by a loan loss provision from a legacy leverage loan portfolio.”

Last December 40 banks holding Yellow Pages Group’s debt were expected to vote on a restructure of YPG’s reported debt mountain of 1.4 billion for the June 2010 financial year. The banks loaned nearly $1.5 billion to Unitas Capital, a Hong Kong-based private equity group, and a Canadian teachers pension fund to help fund the $2.24 billion purchase of Yellow Pages from Telecom in 2007. The debt restructure came after the banks decided against selling Yellow Pages through a sales process run by Goldman Sachs last year, which would have attracted interest from potential buyers ranging from $400 million to $600 million.

The FIPS report also stated that total equity had increased across New Zealand’s banking sector in 2010, “with the exception of Deutsche Bank.”

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Yellow Pages Group New Zealand has agreed to surrender Internet domain names associated with one of its competitors, which sued YPG for trademark infringement.

The suit was brought by the Localist, a local online directory competitor owned by the New Zealand Post newspaper group. The Localist alleged that YPG NZ acquired domains such as www.localist.co.nz and pointed users to its own content.

The company also announced that CEO Bruce Cotterill has resigned, while board member Scott Pomeroy has stepped in as interim CEO. Pomeroy was most recently CEO of the U.S. publisher Local Insight Media.

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Regional press reports suggest that Yellow Pages Group New Zealand may be up for sale.  The company was scooped up by private equity buyers (CCMP Capital Asia and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan) in March 2007 for more than NZ$2 billion. Since then, valuations for directory properties have plummeted, though YPG-NZ remains a very profitable company.

Last November, I spoke with YPG-NZ CEO Bruce Cotterill, who estimated at the time that the company lost about NZ$1 billion in value since the March 2007 sale. His job as CEO, as he saw it, was to get the owners their billion back. To do this, Cotterill has focused  the company on building value by focusing on developing the digital opportunity and improving execution across all facets of the business.

By testing the market for a sale, the owners will have a guage on how much progress Cotterill has made in restoring the company’s valuation.

In other company news, the restaurant featured in YPG-NZ’s  innovative “Yellow Treehouse” ad campaign has won an architecture award. Back in 2008, we blogged about the very clever marketing campaign surrounding the construction of the treehouse restaurant using only materials and services sourced through the Yellow Pages.

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