Yell, publisher of the Yellow Pages, is planning to cut up to 1,300 jobs over the next ten months as it presses ahead with a plan to reduce costs by £100 million by the end of March 2010.

The job losses, being pushed through by John Condron, chief executive of Yell, will be felt across all the group's divisions and will include cutting management jobs as well as slimming down the sales forces and reducing administrative positions.

It marks the second major cost-cutting drive at Yell in little more than a year. During the 12 months to September, about 1,300 jobs were lost, which will have saved about £150 million during its current financial year.

The job losses announced today will generate additional savings and demonstrate a clear deterioration in the economic climate.

"Global economic trends show no sign of improving; therefore, we are actively working on further cuost reduction programmes that will primarily benefit next year," Mr Condron said.

Yell said it was hoping to meet the target reductions by not replacing departing staff. The cull at Yell means the publisher is likely to be left with about 12,600 staff by the end of next September.

As well as cutting jobs, Yell is likely to continue to shift resources to the internet, which generates about 15 per cent of annual sales. Some sales and support staff will probably be redeployed to Yell's internet business, a spokesman said.

Yell, once owned by BT, has been gradually shifting its emphasis from print to online, as customers begin to use the internet rather than books and the telephone for directory enquiries and other search facilities.

Yell today posted a 7.7 per cent increase in pre-tax profits to £344.3 million for the six months to the end of September. Revenues were 6 per cent higher at just over £1 billion for the period.

Shares rose almost 7 per cent, up 4.5p at 70p, despite Yell giving warning that underlying group revenues are likely to fall by five per cent by the end of December.

Underlying sales in the UK, US and Spain are all likely to fall during the final three months of the year, Yell said.

Earlier this year, Yell was forced to suspend dividend payments and renegotiate its banking covenants as it battled to reduce its £3.8 billion debt burden, most of inherited after a leveraged buyout from BT.

Yell said today that its debt obligations had increased since March, but welcomed the extra flexibility the reset covenants gave it.

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