We know that the retail market is not doing that great these days, especially the e-commerce side of things. But brick-and-mortar retail operations like Best Buy (BBY) have been living with adverse conditions for years now, and continue to endure. In fact, Best Buy has some big sales planned for Fourth of July weekend, which some are even comparing to Black Friday sales in the middle of summer. This was good enough for investors, who sent shares up fractionally in Thursday afternoon’s trading.
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Reports noted that Best Buy planned a week-long sales event, which was referred to as “Black Friday in July.” The event is, not surprisingly, timed to coincide roughly with Amazon’s (AMZN) eponymous Amazon Prime Days, and hopefully, steal some of that thunder for themselves.
Best Buy’s senior vice president of customer offerings and fulfillment, Jason Bonfig, explained, “We try to do everything that is the best of who Best Buy is, so it’s the mixture of every category, its the mixture of the Doorbusters, the ‘Deal of the Day’ and then obviously bringing additional value on top of that to our members.” With a recent PwC survey revealing that 37% of shoppers were planning to pare back back-to-school spending, and 44% planning to cut technology purchases, there is a clear demand for Best Buy to improve value to get what it can get.
Dropping Healthcare
It might surprise you to know that Best Buy actually had kind of a healthcare arm in its ownership of Current Health. It might surprise you even more to know that “had” in that previous sentence was quite correct, as Best Buy has it no longer. Its former co-founder, Christopher McGhee, reacquired the firm from Best Buy just recently.
Best Buy bought Current Health back in 2021. Given that this was during the pandemic, an investment in home healthcare made for a good idea. But Best Buy found it a tough needle to thread, as it restructured the health business and took a “…non-cash goodwill impairment charge of $475 million.” McGhee noted that the health sector in general is in “early innings” of a shift from hospital to home-based operations, so, getting Current Health back from Best Buy made a certain sense.
Is Best Buy a Good Stock to Buy?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Moderate Buy consensus rating on BBY stock based on nine Buys, nine Holds, and one Sell assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 13.17% loss in its share price over the past year, the average BBY price target of $80.53 per share implies 11.79% upside potential.
