In 2007, businessman Stanley Tan had a premonition: Internet search engines would kill off the iconic Yellow Pages telephone directory.

Before the turn of the millennium, it was common to flip through the thick book to find phone numbers and addresses. But with Yahoo! Search and Google, the same details could now be retrieved with the click of a button.

“The business we were in had been disrupted by the digital alternative,” Stanley Tan told The Business Times. At the time, he was a major shareholder of mainboard-listed Yellow Pages Singapore, publisher of print directories such as its eponymous one.