Yellow Pages Sold by AT&T for Nearly $1 Billion
Facebook’s purchase of Instagram for $1 billion may have started a trend.
A private equity firm has ponied up $950 million to buy a majority stake in the Yellow Pages from AT&T.
The sale to Cerberus Capital Management includes 1,200 Real Yellow Pages print titles, as well as the YP.com website — all of which brought in about $3.3 billion in revenues last year. In addition, CCM will receive the assets of AT&T Advertising Solutions, which delivers sales and customer support, and AT&T Interactive.
As part of the deal, AT&T itself gets a 47 percent stake in the new umbrella company called YP Holdings.
Jose Gutierrez, president of AT&T Advertising Solutions, said the arrangement “enables AT&T to focus on its core strategy of leadership in wireless, IP, cloud and application-based services [and] gives our advertising customers, partners and developers continued access to strong advertising and search innovation and performance.”