2018 Top 100 Retailers Power Players : Consumer Electronics

2018 Top 100 Retailers Power Players : Consumer Electronics

https://stores.org/2018/06/28/2018-top-100-retailers-power-players-consumer-electronics/

 

〈Best Buy〉

 

 

Apple is pretty much the pacesetter is any field in which it competes. Not so much with music streaming, however, where Apple is striving to catch up with global leader Spotify. With iPhone sales maturing — the segment wouldn’t look anywhere near as good as it does if it weren’t for the four-digit-priced iPhone X — music is an important component of corporate revenues. In fact, Apple Music is the fastest-growing part of Apple services, and expected to grow 40 percent a year over the next three years, forecasts Ben Schachter, an analyst with Macquarie Capital.

 

Best Buy just keeps discovering new ways to stay in business. Its current gambit, hitting stores this summer, is selling televisions powered by Amazon’s Fire TV operating system. The set will carry the Toshiba brand name as well as Best Buy’s private label Insignia brand. Best Buy is also selling the TVs online at Amazon’s website.

 

“What’s new in this partnership is the depth of the physical integration between the software and the hardware,” says Hubert Joly, Best Buy’s chief executive. “The two companies are retailers but they’re also product companies.” Noting the cooperation between two competitors, Joly says, “In the electronics and appliance space, our combined market share is about 25 percent. They’re gaining, we’re gaining, too. It’s not a zero-sum game.”

 

Best Buy is not abandoning the bricks-and-mortar world even though it has closed 42 full-line stores over the past three years and is in the process of closing the last 250 units of its chain of small-footprint mobile phone stores. This fall, Best Buy will be opening its first new store in seven years, a 36,000-square-foot unit in the suburbs of Salt Lake City. “Our stores are a vital component of our multichannel strategy and we believe they are an important competitive advantage,” Best Buy told shareholders in its latest annual report.