D&B to Cut 400 Jobs Worldwide in 2007

D&B (NYSE: DNB), the leading provider of global business information, tools and commercial insight, today announced its financial guidance for the 2007 full-year.

"D&B has a strong track record of meeting our financial guidance while driving significant levels of total shareholder return," said D&B’s Chairman and CEO Steve Alesio. "For 2006, we expect to deliver our sixth consecutive year of strong earnings growth. And, for 2007, we intend to extend our momentum by delivering another year of solid growth and value creation."

2007 Financial Flexibility Initiatives

An integral component of D&B’s Blueprint for Growth strategy is creating financial flexibility to fund investments for growth and to create shareholder value.

Through the Financial Flexibility Program, D&B continually and systematically seeks ways to improve performance in terms of quality and cost.

The 2007 Financial Flexibility Program is designed to significantly reduce the complexity of our business, a process that the company anticipates continuing over the next several years. Specifically, in 2007, D&B will begin addressing complexity reduction and create financial flexibility through several initiatives including the following:

• Organizational Design: this initiative is intended to improve the efficiency of how we are organized and how we operate as a business by addressing spans of control and organizational layers;
• Product and Technology Complexity: this initiative is intended to simplify our product and technology environment by reducing product complexity and proliferation as well as eliminating and consolidating systems and technology infrastructure; and
• Sales Force Effectiveness: this initiative is intended to improve our sales force tools, reduce the non-selling time of our sales force and enhance our new customer acquisition activities.

On an annualized basis, our 2007 Financial Flexibility Program is expected to create $80 million to $85 million of financial flexibility, of which approximately $60 million to $65 million will be generated in 2007, before any transition costs and restructuring charges and before any reallocation of savings generated by the initiatives. To implement these initiatives, D&B expects to incur transition costs of approximately $13 million to $15 million and non-core charges totaling $30 million to $35 million pre-tax. As a result of this reengineering program, we expect that approximately 400 positions will be eliminated globally.