Half-Geek

More about the Yellow Pages Sale

It seems that my post about the sale of the New Zealand Yellow Pages business (which was owned by Telecom) was not the only article floating around in April that asked the question, "Why did those Canadians pay top dollar for that business?''. Simon Hendery who writes for the Herald also raised the issue in a recent article for the Herald Online. I'm quite happy to point out that my post went live before his article ;-) though Simon did have a bit more 'bang' in his article given the use of a direct interview with some big wig at the Yellow Pages. Still I enjoyed his article.

Why buy NZ Yellow Pages for top dollar?

Why did those guys (I don't even remember who they were now) buy the NZ Yellow Pages business for top dollar? I have racked my brain over the past few weeks each time the topic is raised and I just cant see how it was good investment.

Having worked for the mighty yellow submarine (NZ Yellow Pages) in 2001, I have always held interest in the future of their business. In my time there I achieved top sales results for the company, just to add some weight to my following opinions.

The fact that the largest directory in NZ was (in the time I worked for YP) owned by the largest corporation in NZ who also happened to be a monopoly Telco should have meant great future opportunities for the business? The thing was that YP NZ simply could not convert on their Internet product offerings. Even by 2001 when I was working for them, and they had an Internet product suite, the sales focus was still very heavily swayed on the side of the toilet paper books. My blood was as yellow as anyones and I did not give a tinkers toss about the IYP products.

Okay, so that was 2001. Theres a lot of cyber water under the bridge since then. Surely Yellow Pages New Zealand have rectified this issue?  And even if they haven't  the Internet Yellow Pages has a great brand name. Surely the new owners have time on their side in a NZ market where broadband uptake is slow.

Message to new Yellow Pages New Zealand Owners : you had better hurry the hell up. This research from top online competitive market research company Hitwise clearly shows a decline in US use of the YP. Users are  moving towards more user friendly products that have some real wow factor. Google maps, maps live  and  Yahoo! local are starting to make some serious headway into the  market share of the 5 main YP publishers in the USA.

You don't need to look far in NZ (did someone say trademe?) to realize that shifts towards e-commerce in key verticals in the USA are good indicators for our local NZ market.

So again I ask, why did those guys buy the New Zealand Yellow Pages for top dollar?