Best Buy Acquires Carphone’s Stake in U.S. Venture
Best Buy Co. is closing its U.K. big-box stores and paying $1.3 billion to buy out its partner in U.S. mobile-phone retailing as the electronics giant retools its struggling business to focus on smaller shops.
Best Buy and Britain’s Carphone Warehouse Group PLC will maintain a joint venture called Best Buy Europe, focusing on roughly 2,500 phone stores there.But they will stop sharing revenue from similar stores called Best Buy Mobile in the U.S. and Canada, which have become Best Buy’s growth engine.
“Going forward, we are capturing the full profits from our Best Buy Mobile format,” Chief Executive Brian Dunn said in a conference call with investors Monday, adding that the U.K. big-box stores “could not overcome the challenging macro environment and did not provide the results we had expected.”
