British Telecom is considering plans to demerge or sell Yell, its Yellow Pages business.


But it seems unlikely that printing will be affected as RR Donnelley was only awarded the long-term Yellow Pages contract in September 1999, and participated in full-colour trials earlier this year (PrintWeek, 19 January).


RR Donnelley is printing the UK directories at its 37m plant in Knaresborough, where it has installed four MAN Roland Uniset presses. It moved to the new plant from York.


The sale or demerger of Yell is part of a wide-ranging restructure by the telecommunications group and is pending a ruling from the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry on a report produced by the Office of Fair Trading.


Yell distributed 28.8m directories and published 861,000 directories for 417,000 advertisers in the UK in 2000.


Yellow Book, the divisions US business, distributed 17.5m directories and published over 1.15m adverts last year.