Seven Castles

A New Page for “Yellow Pages”- -

                                      

April 20, 2005

 

Breaking monopoly is a historical tide. Though a full deregulation in China's telecom market is yet to come, telecom giants are setting their sights on the lucrative Yellow Pages directory market, making the under-developed segment a new arena to stage fierce competition between China's major telecom operators.

After Netcom set up an independent Yellow Pages company plus eight subsidiaries in the southern provinces and Unicom just delivered its 2005 Shanghai Yellow Pages, Tietong, which has been quietly expanding its fixed-line and broadband users over the past few years, entered the Yellow Pages business for the first time, planning to publish a Yellow Pages directory in July and issue 500,000 copies of its first edition of the Shanghai Yellow Pages Directory 2005 and 2006. As a new comer with new ideas, Tietong boasts to change the data layout and set up several feature categories including private enterprises, foreign-invested firms and Yangtze River Economic Zone.

The new round of competition has worried Telecom, who dominated the Yellow Pages market for about two decades. Years ago, Telecom and Unicom had their day in a Shanghai court to settle a dispute over Yellow Pages publishing rights since Unicom entered the market with a telephone directory jointly invested by the Hong Kong-based PCCW and a United States Yellow Pages marketing firm. As the competition escalates, more clashes are expected.

Moreover, there are a number of independent local and international Yellow Pages operators in numerous cities including Hangzhou-based Yilong Huangbaoshu with operations in Hangzhou and Ningbo. Multiple players will maintain the China Yellow Pages market, still small in size, as one of the fastest growing in the world.

Yellow Pages directories are usually published annually and distributed for free to all residences and businesses within a given coverage area. Yellow Pages publishers make their profits by selling special value-added features to businesses like highlighting their listing, or placing an ad box with the listings in a category. The information contained in the Yellow Pages is essentially a commodity, so publishers often engage in product differentiation tactics like bragging that their listings are more comprehensive or up-to-date. Many publishers now make their listings accessible on "Yellow Pages" Web sites or make multimedia directories, available as a CD-ROM version or on a touch-screen information terminal.

To keep a lion's share in the market, Telecom recently forged strategic partnership with Baidu, a prominent portal with its best-of-the breed Chinese language search engine, to sharpen its competitive edges. Meanwhile, Telecom is close to its final target as a unique nationwide service provider by merging directory publishes in all the provinces.

 

- 作者： zhangliping 访问统计：　2005年04月20日, 星期三 05:20 加入博采