In May, I wrote an article about Best Buy (BBY). The stock price was still clearly beaten after taking a hit in the beginning of the year. At the time, I wrote that the perception of the investors about this stock was still being affected by non-recurrent items. However, the company was taking measures to correct some of its most urgent problems.
The company was striving to be price competitive in order to counter the show-rooming syndrome and to take on the online retailers. At the same time, the company was developing its own online sales strategy. And finally, Best Buy was going through a cost cutting program. All those measures seemed to make sense at the time and since the value metrics were attractive, I classified Best Buy as a value play.
A couple of months after I wrote the article, we start to see some effects of the turnaround. As we can see in graph 1, Best Buy has outperformed the S&P 500 (.INX), RadioShack (RSH) and even Amazon.com (AMZN).
Graph 1 – Best Buy vs S&P 500, Amazon.com, RadioShack (May 2014 to December 2014)
After a turbulent 2014 beginning, Best Buy can surely expect to enter 2015 with a renewed confidence.