The French search and directory company PagesJaunes Groupe has launched a new corporate brand along with its 2012 earnings announcement. The company is now called Solocal Group, an obvious play on SoLoMo (social, local, mobile).

The new corporate brand coincides with an initiative called Digital 2015, designed to accelerate the company’s transformation from a traditional to a digital company. The initiative will focus on accelerating online growth with new products and offers, improving the performance of its digital media properties and changing the internal culture to be more flexible and digitally focused.

It appears the Solocal will be the corporate brand but PagesJaunes will remain as a consumer brand, for the time being at least. PagesJaunes has historically been a strong brand in France, Solocal’s largest market. The company also has operations in Luxembourg and Spain.

The company also announced its 2012 earnings, showing steady progress toward transforming the business not only from print to digital but from a directory and search company to one that offers a wide range of services to local businesses. Solocal sees mobile as key to its future growth. Mobile revenues grew 150 percent in 2012 to 45 million euros, or about 7 percent of online revenues.

For the full year 2012, PagesJaunes generated total revenues of 1,066 million euros, a 3.2 percent decline. Online revenues 623 million euros or 58 percent of total revenue. Online grew by 8.3 percent while print declined by 15.1 percent to 417 million euros. The print decline accelerated in 2012. In 2011, print fell by 9.2 percent groupwide.

The 2012 results show margins are under some pressure, with the overall gross margin declining from 44.8 percent to 44.2 percent. Print margins fell from 45.7 percent to 45.0 percent and online margins dropped from 44.8 percent to 44.0 percent. This pattern is common in global directory companies, as competition increases and organizations rely increasingly on lower margin products for growth.

Overall, PagesJaunes’s results benchmark favorably against its global peers, primarily because the company has put itself in a position where it can more easily sustain print declines, which are likely to continue to accelerate. The Digital 2015 initiative is an indication that the company believes there is more it needs to do, and perhaps more urgency is required, to complete its transformation.

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The French directory company PagesJaunes Groupe reported 2011 revenues of 1.1 billion euros today, with 575 million euros from digital sources. That’s 52.2 percent of total revenues. The company, which has a dominant position in directories in France, posted a 2.1 percent revenue decline in 2011, which is a solid performance by directory company standards.

By reaching a 50 percent level, PagesJaunes only has to grow digital revenues at the same pace as its print revenues decline to achieve top-line equilibrium (this doesn’t address margins). In the fourth quarter the publisher fell just shy of that goal, with digital growth pacing at 8.6 percent, while print declined 9.3 percent in the quarter.

PagesJaunes is pushing hard into a variety of digital and mobile products. The company is active in digital presence management, verticals (real estate, home services), mobile (13 million app downloads) and online display, including a deal with Facebook to participate in its API program, as well as a local ad exchange via its Horyzon Media acquisition.

For 2012, PagesJaunes expects to see its revenue declines stabilize further, and foresees 60 percent digital revenues by year-end.

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PagesJaunes, the French directory publisher, recently announced the launch of 123deal in Italy, Germany and the U.K. The daily deals and local discounts portal and search engine is also available in France and Spain. The location-based search option allows users to locate categorized deals on an interactive map.

In the U.K., 123deal has 18 partners offering more than 90 deals by city in 52 cities. Users may also use keyword searches and filters to select offers according to different criteria such as geographic proximity, category, price, discount and partner website. In addition, users may customize their favorite categories and have those particular deal selections sent to them via email newsletter.

PagesJaunes isn’t the only player looking to cash in on the U.K. daily deals market. NimbleCommerce, the local commerce and group-buying platform, recently announced that it has signed new deals with U.K. media companies, including Johnston Press. To support its new U.K. clients, the company has also opened up a London office with plans for further expansion into Europe.

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First-quarter 2011 earnings reports are trickling in across the global Yellow Pages industry, and while the results are still largely negative, there are some signs that the rate of revenue decline is leveling off. This is consistent with what BIA/Kelsey has forecast for the Yellow Pages industry — a leveling off of print declines leading to a return to very modest growth by 2013.

SuperMedia, for example, reported that its advertising sales for the first quarter were down 17.8 percent this year, compared with a 20.4 percent drop in Q1 last year. Operating revenues were also down 17.8 percent, compared with 20.9 percent in Q1 last year. These are not monumental improvements, but they suggest some progress in stemming the flow of red ink.

At Dex One, ad sales declined roughly 17 percent vs. 19 percent a year ago. CFO Steve Blondy noted that were it not for the impact of TMP’s failure to pay money owed the publisher (TMP is currently winding down its operations) the ad sales decline would have been 14.7 percent, a more substantial improvement over Q1 2010.

Similarly, SuperMedia’s CFO Samuel Jones said factoring out the TMP impact would have given the company a Q1 ad sales decline of 15.9 percent, which amounts to a 450 bps improvement over Q1 2010.

AT&T’s results were essentially the same, down 16.6 percent in Q1 vs. 16.7 percent a year earlier. However, online growth continued to slow down, to a 6.8 percent increase vs. 12.9 percent last year. This suggests the rate of decline in print has settled a bit, otherwise the overall revenue decline would have accelerated.

AT&T has been arguably the most aggressive U.S. publisher online, and has recently added a number of new digital products, including reputation management and, most recently, deals. The slowdown in digital growth is likely a combination of the economy and the law of large numbers, since AT&T has roughly a billion in digital revenues. However, the slowdown might also suggest that IYP is maturing and new products are taking on greater importance as sources of new growth.

Across the pond in France, PagesJaunes reports its group revenues declined by just 1 percent for the first quarter, while its print decline was 7.5 percent, an improvement over a 10.2 percent drop in Q1 2010.

Collectively, these results seem to point to stabilization, defined as a leveling off of the rate of decline. This is probably the result of improving economic conditions, which includes steady improvement in bad debt ratios. This is consistent with the view that the decline in print revenues was the result of a combination of economic and transformational factors. The degee to which growth rates improve this year may be a pretty good indication of which portion of the recent declines have been cyclical vs. secular.  

None of these Q1 numbers is going to lead to any champagne being uncorked, but they do suggest that after a couple of very rough years, the worst may be over, at least for now.

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The French directory publisher PagesJaunes has joined the growing list of global Yellow Pages companies that are building or buying their way into the deal-a-day space. PagesJaunes has acquired the French group buying site top-deals.fr, and has rebranded the product as 123deal to be consistent with its 123people online people search brand.

We recently reported that the Australian publisher Sensis has launched its own deal-a-day product, joining Yellow Pages Group, DirectWest, Yellowbook and other publishers with similar offerings.

The logic for publishers is simple. Directory companies see deal a day as a promising new revenue stream, as well as an avenue into new or deeper relationships with advertiser categories that are not traditionally strong in print Yellow Pages, specialty retail and fine dining among them. Plumbers and remodelers are less likely to do a deal on Groupon or one of its clones than a gift shop or an Ethiopian restaurant.

The challenge for PagesJaunes and others is building a base of consumers large and engaged enough to tip deals. We think PagesJaunes may have a better chance than most Yellow Pages companies, given its strong brand in France and its track record for building strong consumer experiences.

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The French directory publisher PagesJaunes has made a significant move by acquiring 100 percent of the Austrian people search site 123People, which has a global audience of more than 40 million unique visitors in 11 countries, according to the PagesJaunes announcement. Terms were not disclosed.

Here is how PagesJaunes CEO Jean-Pierre Remy describes the deal:

“We are delighted to have acquired 123people, which fits perfectly with our growth strategy and reinforces our leadership in people search on the Internet. 123people is a genuine Internet success story and will enable us to accelerate the growth of our audiences and offer advertisers additional visibility and traffic. With this acquisition, PagesJaunes Groupe will significantly increase its total audience, strengthen its expertise in natural listing and benefit from new synergies between 123people and the Group’s sites in France and Spain.”

123People acts like a personal reputation management tool. It aggregates all the places where an individual appears online. I did a search on myself and found various photos of me, as well as of others who share my name, links to blogs I’ve written, videos I’ve posted, pages online where my name appears and so on. It’s a useful site to find and learn about other people, and to track the various ways in which you appear online.

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