Saturday, August 04, 2007

Gennaro Castaldo watch: Now he's a Fopp

Surveying his new, expanded kingdom, Gennaro Castaldo welcomes the formal transfer of Fopp into the HMV family. (And it is a family. A dysfunctional one with two members of life support already, but a family nevertheless):

"Those stores actually were profitable and the Fopp brand - there's a lot of customer interest in it, it was very appealing, and I think it was working strongly across the country, but some stores were purchased and maybe didn't fit in with the original plans."

"Where those members of staff are available we'll certainly be looking to rehire them which hopefully will mean up to 70 jobs are saved."

As some commenters have pointed out, HMV are by no means picking up all the profitable links in the Fopp chanin, which suggests that the company simply couldn't extend itself to take on any more - you can see they might want to have avoided the MusicZone and MVC branches that dragged down Fopp in the first place, but there must have been some other branches which the people currently keeping HMV afloat wouldn't extend on.


3 comments:

Chris Brown said...

I suppose in fairness they might also want to avoid branches that are liable to compete with existing ones - although none of the ones they're keeping are in places I know well, so I've no idea if that's really the case.

Anonymous said...

In glasgow they're keeping a branch (union st) open where there are two HMV's nearby, but not the byres road branch, which is the only music shop around that area and is always busy..

Simon Hayes Budgen said...

It's a fair point, Chris, but in HMV's statements so far - including the one about keeping the Fopp brand - suggests they view Fopp as aiming at a different market segment to HMV.

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