Sign of the Times at Best Buy

Best Buy, the U.S. electronics retailer, is reorganizing its retail sales groups into one "connectivity business group" that will focus on sales of mobile phones, computers, tablets, e-readers and the appropriate service plans at Best Buy and Best Buy Mobile stores.

The products inside the CBG group make up more than half of Best Buy's in-store sales as well as representing the fastest growing sectors for the company, outside of computers. That tells you quite a lot about what "consumer electronics" means these days, as well as where the sales volume is generated. 

Mobile phones and service plans are the largest generator of revenue at Best Buy.

The group will be comprised of 35,000 employees. Best Buy reorganizes around connected devices
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Voice Usage and Texting Trends Headed in Opposite Directions

Image
You can see where this is going. Younger users text more than they talk, and though today's users 25 and above still talk more than they text, the usage pattern is uniform: younger age cohorts text more than older age cohorts.

So as each age cohort advances, one might predict that texting behavior will grow over time. How much it grows is the only real question.

Users 18 or younger actually"talk" about as much as users 55 to 64. One suspects an awful lot of "voice" activity is of the coordination and collaboration sort, so that younger and mid-life workers might be in work groups that require more coordination than workers 55 to 64.
Read more

Who Are the Key Telco Competitors?

Image
Industry competitors normally pay money to track their market share versus their "real" competitors. The problem is that, in rapidly-changing and porous new markets, the legacy competitors--even when they are the most benchmarked firms--are not the strategic competitors.
These days, many service providers would say that "Google" or other app providers are their key competitors, even as they continue to benchmark against others in their "narrow" markets (mobile market share, or fixed network video or internet access).

The biggest single change in the internet value chain between 2005 and 2010, for example, was the shift of revenue from telcos to Apple, Microsoft and Google. Telecom providers lost 12 percent of profit, while Apple, Microsoft and Google gained 11 percent.
source: McKinsey
Nevertheless, the strategic issue is diminishing relevance. The "access to the internet" and associated service provider functions simply represent less value in th…
Read more

Jio is Succeeding at "Destroying" the India Mobile Market

Image
By now, telecom executives are well aware of the “disruption” market strategy, whereby new entrants do not so much try and “take market share” as they attempt to literally destroy existing markets and recreate them.
Skype and VoIP provider one example. The “Free” services run by Illiad provide other examples. Most recently, we have seen Reliance Jio disrupting the economics of the mobile market in India, offering free voice in a market where voice drives service provider revenues.
“Free” is a difficult price point in most markets. But free voice forever is among the pricing and packaging foundations for Reliance Jio’s fierce attack on India’s mobile market structure. “Free voice” does not only lead to Jio taking market share, but reshapes the market, destroying the foundation of its competitor business models.
At the same time, Jio hopes to become the leader in the new market, driven by mobile data, with far-higher usage and subscribership, and vastly-lower prices. source: GSMA
Disruption…
Read more