Roger Asplund:

If we compare usage with Onet, we are quite behind Panorama Polska has published the Polish Yellow Pages since February 1992 and today is the country's largest phone directory publisher with a database of 700,000 companies. In 1998 the firm turned its Web site into a portal, Panorama Firm (www.panoramafirm.com.pl), offering online searches of its database directory as well as news and other information. Last month the portal had almost 24 million hits with users mainly logging onto its online phone and address directory, which is updated weekly. Yet Panorama Firm is a minor portal player in Polish cyberspace. Only 2.2% of respondents to a recent survey by the market research company Taylor Nelson Sofres/OBOP said they used the portal more than others. Roger Asplund, Panorama Polska's 41-year-old managing director, recently spoke with the WBJ's Roseanne Gerin about the firm's Internet arm. The following is an edited version of their conversation. Q: Why did Panorama Polska decide to create a portal? A: I'm not 100% sure but I think that was what was put into the market by a lot of companies and was in fashion at that time. What more or less improved over time was to have two services in one - the Yellow Pages, then the portal. Q: Last March, the Swedish telecom company Eniro, the largest phone directory publisher in the Nordic region and owner of the Internet firm Scandinavia Online, acquired Panorama Polska. What does Eniro plan to do with Panorama Firm? A: If we look at the usage on this site from a Yellow Pages perspective, we're doing pretty well. If we compare usage with (portal) Onet, we are quite behind. Our aim is to have as much business-driven usage and that makes the comparison a little difficult. We say that we are No. 7 today in search usage, but if we compare business usage we move up quite a bit. We would like to grow on usage, but mainly we would like to grow on business usage. Q: How will you do that? A: We need to make the market much more aware of the Yellow Pages and that will also have a direct impact (on) the Internet. We should look into what drives business usage, but in that area we're doing pretty well. It's (a matter of) making the market more aware of the Yellow Pages in general. Q: How important is online advertising to the portal? A: That's our only (source of) revenue because we don't charge for usage. Q: How much money do you expect to make from the sale of online ads this year? A: I can't tell you (because) we're listed on the (Stockholm) stock exchange and we are not allowed to produce numbers. We bought the company last March and we will not report that in the first quarter of this year ... so our first report will be in the second quarter. Q: Are you considering charging users for services such as function-enhanced e-mail? A: Not right now. What we're looking into is how much of a portal do we really want to have and how much should we provide and what we need to do to bring up the usage. We want the usage to be business driven (for) the Yellow Pages, so we mostly use the portal to make people aware that we have the Yellow Pages service. That is why we try to invest in the portal to bring up the usage in the Yellow Pages because we think that our short (term) revenue will be from advertising, not usage. Q: Do you consider your portal to be a competitor of Onet, Wirtualna Polska and Interia? A: Yes and no. We can't compete and we haven't been trying to compete because they have a lot of services that we don't provide. What we can see is that all the portals have almost too much usage if you look at what they're able to charge for advertising. Onet has some revenue coming in from (online ads) but its costs (are) much higher. If (Onet) puts a Yellow Pages service on(line) and a lot of people use that portal for something that we can't provide on our portal … the risk is they stop using our Yellow Pages service and go to the other service. Q: How important is the portal to Panorama Polska's overall business? A: The portal drives some usage for the Yellow Pages. If we see the portion of Internet revenue that comes mostly from the Yellow Pages, it is important for our company and it will be in the future. We think that the Internet part of the (directory service) will grow at a faster pace year by year. If everything goes as planned, Internet will be a bigger piece of this industry. But that is nothing in particular for Poland and for Panorama Polska since it (would be the same) for all the Yellow Pages directories.