Founded in 1880, R.H. Donnelley turned into a legendary telephone directory publishing company. However, over the past few years, things have been particularly brutal. In fact, this week the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

R.H. Donnelley has roughly 600 local business directories. To build this scale, R.H. Donnelley struck a variety of M&A deals. For example, there was a $2 billion purchase of Sprint's operations, as well as the $9.5 billion deal for Dex Media.

Continue reading R.H. Donnelley bites the dust

R.H. Donnelley bites the dust originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 29 May 2009 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The rumors were true; Business.com was in play. And today we know the buyer: R.H. Donnelley (NYSE: RHD).

The deal comes to about $345 million.

Like other dot-coms, it hasn't been easy. The company got its start back in 1999 and spent a cool $7.5 million for the Business.com domain name. Over the years, Business.com has built a solid and profitable business, with about $50 million in revenues.

As for R.H. Donnelley, it's a must-have deal. With the traditional Yellow Pages threatened by players like Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and even Craigslist, the company certainly needs a digital strategy.

Also, with the scale of Donnelly, the Business.com footprint should get a boost. And I bet we'll see some more dealmaking.

But investors are not happy about the price tag. So far today, shares of Donnelly are down nearly 9% to $66.60.

For some more recent M&A transactions, click here.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.

R.H. Donnelley gets some dot-com magic originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Thu, 26 Jul 2007 15:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.