GameStop (GME) – Get the report shares soared on Wednesday as investors reacted to members of the video game retailer’s board of directors and cheered on holiday sales results.
Shares of Grapevine, Texas, for the last time, rose 68% to $ 33.45.
Earlier this week, the retailer reached an agreement with RC Ventures to place three of New York activist investor candidates Alan Attal, Ryan Cohen and Jim Grube on the board.
A GameStop statement said the three executives have “deep experience in e-commerce, online marketing, finance and strategic planning.”
The addition of Cohen and the other new directors is positive given his success at Chewy (ALL) – Get the report and the vision of “making GameStop a more digitally focused retailer,” Telsey analyst Joseph Feldman wrote in a note Tuesday, according to Bloomberg.
Cohen is the RC Ventures manager and co-founder of Chewy.com pet supplies specialist, which bought PetSmart in 2017 for $ 3.35 billion.
In November, RC Ventures urged the company to do a strategic review of its business and focus on digital sales.
The company, in a December Securities and Exchange Commission presentation, expressed its willingness to engage more with the company “to produce the best results for all shareholders.”
The company also reported a quadrupling of e-commerce sales during the nine-week holiday shopping season. The figure accounted for approximately 34% of total sales.
So far, e-commerce sales have exceeded $ 1.35 billion, GameStop said, surpassing the company’s $ 1 billion target. Sales in comparable stores increased by 4.8%
GameStop said in a statement that it had seen “an unprecedented demand for recently launched game consoles and, although consumer demand far exceeded the restricted supply in the nine-week period, the company believes these products they will generate sales by 2021, as the availability of consoles from our suppliers improves later in the year. “