Yell clinches €1.2bn US deal
The owner of Yellow Pages, the UK version of the Golden Pages, bolstered it US operation today with a deal worth £829m (€1.2bn) for a leading directories publisher in California and Texas.
Reading-based Yell announced the acquisition as it posted results showing a 12% rise in underlying earnings to £402.8m (€586,2m) in the year to March 31. The company also pledged to increase its final dividend to shareholders by 40%.
The deal for TransWestern establishes Yell’s US operation Yellow Book as the fifth-largest directory publisher in the United States. It will publish 897 directories in 45 states and employ around 6,000 sales staff.
Yell has now completed 26 US acquisitions since 1999, including McLeod and National Directory Company in 2002.
Today’s results showed Yell increased turnover by 12.5% to £620.9m (€903.5m) in the US, while in the UK the figure was up 4.6% at £664.4m (€966.8m), reflecting a cap imposed by regulators that reduced prices by an average of 3.3%.
The total number of print advertisers stood at 478,000, down slightly on last year after the customer retention rate fell to 75%, from 77% last time. It blamed increased competition and substantial growth in its customer base over the last five years for the fall.
Yell.com revenues increased by 40.3% to £36.2m (€52.7m), it added.
Shares in the company, which is at the centre of a British Competition Commission investigation into the directories market, rose more than 2% as the performance was ahead of expectations for underlying earnings of around £400m (€582m).
