Yellow snaps up bulk buy website

Yellow announced yesterday it had bought group-buying site www.groupy.co.nz. Photo / Paul Estcourt

Yellow Pages Group has bought a small online bulk-buying company as it negotiates its way through the next stage of its massive and fraught restructuring.

Yellow announced yesterday it had bought group-buying site www.groupy.co.nz.

It will soon announce a new look for the firm which buys in bulk and markets daily deals at prices with big discounts - typically of 50 to 90 per cent.

Deals can be bought online and redeemed with a voucher at a local merchant.

Yellow digital director Peter Crowe said Yellow would be able to leverage groupy and would help to build its advertisers' business.

Groupy was set up six months ago and will keep the founders Scott Kitney and Andrew Hunt alongside fellow shareholder Lance Wiggs.

Meanwhile, bankers trying to recover money they are owed from Yellow Pages Group are focused on a new structure that reflects its much smaller scale.

Yellow managing director Bruce Cotterill said details would be revealed later this week or early next week

The firm was bought by private equity interests at the height of the equities boom and the value of Yellow Directories' goodwill and the brand has been written down from $2.17 billion to $567 million.

The firm revealed on Christmas Eve a $1.44 billion loss in the year to June 30 - one of the biggest corporate losses in New Zealand history.

It was put up for sale last year by its bankers only to be withdrawn from the market in September.

At the time Yellow said it was "hoping to have a restructuring plan in place by Christmas", including shifting its assets into a new company and putting a new board of directors in place.

One month later the makeup of that new structure has still not been spelt out.