The US video game retailer GameStop, which hit the headlines due to the extreme price rally of its shares, wants to push the strategy change towards e-commerce with a new management duo.
With Matt Furlong and Mike Recupero, the company has signed two former Amazon managers as chief executives and chief financial officers, respectively, as GameStop announced on Wednesday after the US market closed.
Both positions were vacant after resignations in recent months.
GameStop wants to say goodbye to the dusty and ailing business model of a classic retail chain for computer games and to become a modern technology provider for online gamers. The selection of top staff follows this calculation. Three months ago, Jenna Owens, a tech veteran who was responsible for day-to-day business and who previously worked for the internet giants Google and Amazon, went on board.
Business at GameStop has been a little better recently. In the three months to the beginning of May, sales rose by around a quarter to 1.3 billion dollars (1.1 billion euros) compared to the same period last year and were thus above market expectations. GameStop continues to be in the red, but at least reduced the loss from $ 165.7 million in the same period last year to $ 66.8 million, according to the quarterly figures also published on Wednesday.
GameStop made headlines at the beginning of the year with a real speculative battle on the stock exchange. The company has actually been in crisis for a long time, but driven by small investors organized on the Internet, the shares had rallied breathtakingly. That in turn broke hedge funds that bet on a price decline, huge losses. In January the stock hit a record high of over $ 483. On Wednesday it closed at a good $ 302, which corresponds to an enormous price increase of over 1500 percent since the beginning of the year.