January 16, 2018 – Yellow Pages cuts another 500 jobs in struggle to survive

Ross Marowits
MONTREAL
The Canadian Press

An iconic Canadian company with roots in printed telephone directories has shed nearly 18 per cent of its workforce in what may be its final attempt to remain viable in the digital age, says an industry expert.

“I think this is it,” said Louis Hebert of the University of Montreal HEC business school.

He said Montreal-based Yellow Pages Ltd. has two options – give itself a little breathing room to develop a new strategy or stabilize the organization for a potential buyer.

“The alternative to these scenarios is the progressive degradation and bankruptcy or a fire sale,” he said in an interview.

Yellow Pages has cut another 500 jobs across the country as it continues to struggle with a shift of consumer preferences from print to digital directories.

The company said the job losses, which took effect Tuesday, are on top of 300 positions that were eliminated in October 2015.

Considerable effort has already been made to transform Yellow Pages, which was founded in 1908, from a publisher of printed directories to a digital model in an era of growing cellphone use.

Digital now accounts for 70 per cent of revenues, but even those have stalled and slightly declined of late.

Hebert said those type of transitions are risky and the Yellow Pages has shown it has been unable to pull it off, especially in the face of deep-pocketed competitors like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft.

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