Best Buys Big Strategic Moves

Best Buy Europe will scrap plans for big box stores, closing all 11 of the U.K pilot stores. Instead it will focus on its 2,500 profitable small box stores.

Best Buy will buy Carphone Warehouse’s Stake in Best Buy Mobile for $1.3 billion in cash. The deal is designed to increase Best Buy’s profits.

Best Buy and Carphone Warehouse have created a new venture called Global Connect to "provide the intellectual capital and connections expertise that has created the market-leading customer experience in North America and Europe to other markets worldwide."

Best Buy will buy managed services and cloud services provider mindShift Technologies for $167 million in cash. mindShift provides cloud services, data center services to more than 5,400 clients and 25,000 managed desktops.

mindShift had been on an acquisition program of its own, most recently snapping up ORBIT Systems, a Minneapolis-based MSP.

mindShift’s services offerings include cloud, virtualization, disaster recovery, security, email and hosted offerings.

"There’s no question that acquiring the skills, capabilities and clients of mindShift has the potential to help expand Best Buy’s global services capabilities in the vast small and mid-sized business market," said George Sherman, senior vice president of Best Buy Services. "As important, the mindShift team will bring added experience, talent and resources to the remote support capability we have been building within our multi-channel tech service unit Geek Squad."

Best Buy said in a statement that the mindShift acquisition would expand its suite of services offerings and capitalize on an attractive growth opportunity in the SMB market.

"Each of these actions represents an exciting growth opportunity for Best Buy and near and long-term value for our shareholders. We are aggressively ramping up our growing connections capability to support consumers’ increasingly connected lives across the entire range of devices entering the marketplace," said Brian J. Dunn, CEO of Best Buy.