Yellow loses key director
The Yellow Pages Group has lost a key director.
An insider confirmed today that Andrew Day has quit Yellow’s board.
The resignation is a blow to Yellow, which will lose the director’s international expertise.
Mr Day is a former chief executive of Telstra’s Yellow & White Pages division, Sensis, and former chief executive of the pan-European directory company Truvo.
Yellow has been struggling with heavy losses blamed on the high debt load taken on by its private equity owners.
In 2007, CCMP (now Unitas Capital) and Ontario Teachers Plan paid Telecom $2.2 billion for Yellow.
Latest financial statements for the June 2009 year showed ebitda of $162.7 million, down 3% on the previous year. But interest payments alone were $157 million, contributing to a $338 million loss.
The company has also been grappling with a major upgrade to its website, the often-less-useful-than-Google yellow.co.nz, still months away; a database thief; and at times comically bad usability issues with its 018 service, now offshored to the Philippines.
A spokeswoman said Yellow may make a comment on Mr Day’s departure later today.
Yellow had no comment on renewed market rumour that its lenders - NZ, ANZ and Westpac - are getting nervous and pushing for a Yellow Pages Group sale.
Collectively, the banks are owed around $1.72 billion.
As previously reported by NBR's print edition (see our Print Archive article Banks fear the Yellow Peril as loan runs out), the lenders have even canvassed the option of bringing in a receiver - but a sale cannot be forced with the company still inside its banking covenants.
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Comments and questions2
Mention of Sensis is a cruel twist of the knife in this context given that it was recently hit with a Court decision in Australia that said it could not claim copyright in in its Yellow and White Pages directories. Not exactly what a hard pressed NZ Yellow would have wanted to hear.
It often amuses me when I read about companies that are struggling under mountains of debt while complaining about "tough competition" and very flat to negative revenue earnings. I go and take a look at the way their website is set and how well it is maintained - or not as is the case of Yellow Pages and what sort of people they have making the tough decisions and is the product or service range they are offering, relevant?
In the case with Yellow Pages the answer is a resounding NO!
Why?
They are doing a poor job of trying to market a useless product that passed its use by date the moment the planet switched to Google for search.
They have an iPhone app that doesn't work properly and hasn't been updated since October 2009 despite being part of a recent marketing campaign for Yellow Chocolate
They may claim to be great at corporate governance but they certainly don't have a clue of what it takes to get the basics right and keep them operating correctly.
So good riddance to bad rubbish.
Cheers.
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