Don't judge a book by its cover, or its size

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 22 January 2008 02:52

Opinion and Analysis

At Telstra's day long good news deluge last November (aka its Investor Day Briefing) there was good news aplenty from its directories business, Sensis. But its flagship Yellow Pages directory seems to be shrinking. Sensis group managing director, Bruce Akhurst said: "I am really delighted to tell you that we will successfully turn the Yellow Print result around from a decline last year into positive growth this year. While today isn't the occasion to report trading results, I can tell you that the Yellow Print results for metro, which is now in and final, has seen very substantial improvements right across the board."

He added that this turnaround "hasn't been through price," adding "I am very, very confident that we have a sustainable growth plan for Yellow Print to go with continued strong growth with Yellow on-line....The result in Yellow is very, very important because Yellow, as a whole, represents over $1.2 billion of revenue."

He then went on to tell his audience that "Sensis is the sixth largest directories company in the world. Our 07 directories revenue grew by  four percent compared to  three percent for the global benchmark, and of the top 10 directory businesses, we are number one, not just for revenue share of GDP but for revenue per capita, revenue per directories title, revenue per distributed copy, and revenue per sales representative. That's a remarkable achievement."

To cap it off Akhurst said: "While we are a world leader in print directories growth, both Yellow and White Pages print will improve on their 07 growth results with White Pages again breaking world records and likely to hit double-digit growth."

Well I'm not sure where that growth is coming from if it's not through price. The 2008 Sydney Yellow Pages, which must account for a sizeable chunk of Yellow's annual print directory revenue has just landed on my doorstep and guess what: it's almost 10 percent smaller than last year's edition: 2752 pages compared to 3016.

I also notice that last year Sensis managed to sell five out of the six advertising spaces on the covers of the two volume set: outside back covers, spines and front page bottom strips. This year it managed only four. It filled the front page strips with a  little help from its friends: Foxtel and Amdocs "the market leader in customer experience systems innovation". Foxtel is 50 percent owned by Telstra and Amdocs is a major supplier to Sensis (and to Telstra). As Akhurst said: "Working with Amdocs, Sensis is transforming the way we do business by introducing a world-class integrated IT system and a single seamless end-to-end process."

Amdocs provides OSS/BSS systems to the world's largest telcos: just the sort of company that the average Yellow Pages user needs to know about!