Shopping Centers Today is the news magazine of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)
Issue link: https://sct.epubxp.com/i/528948
Research firm Kantar Worldpanel announced in January of this year that HMV had overtaken Amazon.com as the U.K.'s biggest music retailer, after HMV's 2014 revenues surged by nearly 50 percent over the previous year, to £365.7 million (about $567 million), garnering the chain roughly 43 percent of the market for physically recorded electronic entertainment. The chain's CD sales increased by 1.5 percent last year, despite an overall mar- ket decline of 4.9 percent. This boosted HMV's share of the British CD market to 27 percent, even as the chain's total retail floor space shrank by 34 percent. The company's DVD sales slipped by Hen BRiTisH MUsiC-AnD- entertainment chain HMV filed for bankruptcy in January 2013, ana- lysts saw just one more casualty of digitalization. But in April of that year, private equity firm Hilco Capital stepped in, acquiring about £110 million in debt and paying off some £20 million that HMV owed in taxes. now, some two and half years along, a surprising thing has happened: This is the day the music has not died for this 93-year-old chain. HMV Retail, as the former HMV Group has been renamed, is profitable again. 13 percent, but other competitors fared worse. Hilco Capital claims that HMV's market share of DVD and Blu-ray sales grew to 22 percent; all told, one in three CDs, DVDs and/or Blu-rays under Brit- ish Christmas trees last year came from HMV, according to the firm. For eight years HMV was on a slide — shares fell from 80 pence in 2005 to 1 pence at the beginning of 2013, when executives of the insolvent firm brought in Deloitte as administrator. Back then, analysts saw the bankruptcy not just as the demise of a sto- ried chain, but also as the end of an era. "HMV's collapse has been brought about by the rapid transition of entertainment to, firstly, online retail, and secondly, digi- tal downloads," Lisa Byfield-Green, an analyst at U.K. retail consultancy Planet Retail, told SCT at the time. Perhaps the biggest factor helping W not the same old song HMV is back froM bankruptcy and bucking Music sales trends By Bennett Voyles r e t a i l i n g t o d a y 28 S C t / J u l y 2 0 1 5 P h o t o : a l l i a n c e / D a n i e l K a l K e r / n e w s c o m