Pia Gets Caught in the Net

[Mulboyne]

Yomiuri: Net info proves costly for Pia magazine

Pia Corp. has announced the sale of Gourmet Pia, an online provider of restaurant information, to Tokyo-based investment fund Nippon Mirai Capital Co. Declining sales of Pia magazine, the main product of leading ticket seller Pia since its release in 1972, was the major reason for the disposal of Gourmet Pia...According to a Pia employee, Gourmet Pia, including its database on about 15,000 restaurants and naming rights, was sold for about 112 million yen. All 40 employees were transferred to the new company...Gourmet Navigator Inc., which was listed in April on the Hercules start-up market of the Osaka Stock Exchange, is the largest restaurant Web site, offering information on about 45,000 restaurants. Gourmet Pia is said to be the second largest.

Gourmet Navigator turned profitable in 2001 and now makes a profit of around 600 million yen on turnover of 5.5 billion. The stock doubled on listing and subsequently gave up its gains

[Mulboyne]

[floatr][/floatr]Hiroshi Yanai, founder and CEO of ticket sales company Pia, has given an interview to Zakak in which he denies that his company is on the brink of bankruptcy. Such rumours have been circulating since Yanai unveiled plans for large-scale redundancies following another poor year of trading which pushed the firm into the red and caused the stock price to fall nearly 50%. A major factor behind the recent woes was a glitch in the new ticket sales system which Pia rolled out in January. Ticket sales fell by 70% compared with the Jan-Mar quarter last year. On top of this problem, investors were alerted to the possibility that Pia might breach one of the financial covenants attached to a syndicated loan it had taken out which would throw into doubt its ability to remain a going concern. Yanai says it is regrettable that he was unable to secure additional financing before the books closed in March which made the auditor's warning necessary. However, he says that a 2 billion yen share issue, with half the funds coming from Toppan Printing and some from Yanai himself, has restored financial stability. However, he had to promise investors a major restructuring hence the first major redundancy programme in the company's history. ZakZak points out that Pia has yet to meet its targets for this plan and suggests that investors will remain wary until concrete signs of recovery are evident.