Donnelley to Sell Its Tustin-Based Yellow Pages Unit

Donnelley Information Publishing said Tuesday it has agreed to sell its Tustin-based Southern California yellow pages publishing operation to an outside investment group in a deal expected to close in May.

Terms were not disclosed. The investment group is headed by Massachusetts coupon publisher Joseph Browning, who worked for Donnelley as a manager in Southern California and other regions for nearly a dozen years.

Donnelley Information publishes 18 directories for Southern California and has about 230 employees in five offices from Los Angeles to San Diego. The Tustin headquarters is the largest office with about 90 employees, said Ed Lederer, senior vice president for business development at Reuben H. Donnelley Corp. The company, based in Purchase, N.Y., is Donnelley Information’s parent.

Browning could not be reached for comment, but in a prepared statement said his group plans to continue the Southland operation with the same employees.

Lederer said he too understood that the buyers did not plan any layoffs or immediate changes in the 12-year-old operation. “The change in ownership should be transparent to clients when it occurs,” he said.

Lederer denied rumors that Donnelley’s Southern California operation would have been shut down if a sale had not been arranged. The operation “is profitable, although it took some time” to get there, he said.

The decision to sell, Lederer said, was part of a plan to refocus the company’s efforts. He declined to comment further, but did say that the Southern California directory unit was Donnelley’s only subsidiary in the West. The company publishes directories in Las Vegas, but as a partner with the local telephone service provider. The rest of its operations are clustered in the East and Midwest.

Donnelley Corp., a subsidiary of financial services publishing giant Dun & Bradstreet Corp., publishes or is sales agent for almost 400 yellow pages-type directories with total circulation of 47 million. The Southern California unit accounts for just 6.2 million directories a year, or about 13% of the total.

The Tustin-based operation reportedly has been hurt by the freewheeling competition in the yellow pages market.

There are several local and regional directory publishers in Southern California, where hundreds of thousands of businesses clamor for public notice and search for every possible edge to climb above the pack.

Operations much larger than Donnelley’s are run by both Pacific Bell and GTE Corp.