Best Buy 2008 Annual Report Download - page 3

Best Buy Fiscal 2008 Annual Report | 1
“I wouldn’t want to trade places with any other
CEO. I believe that putting our full assets at
the command of our employees closest to
the customer can generate sizeable
growth. Moreover, I believe our
industry is so attractive, given
the transformative change
that technology is enabling
for customers.”
To our shareholders
Best Buy made great progress on the core challenges we
undertook at the beginning of fi scal 2008, as we continue
our customer centricity journey. We extended new and
improved offerings to the consumer with the launch of
Best Buy Mobile, the Apple store-within-a-store roll-out and
the addition of Dell computers, to name a few. We improved
the level of employee engagement and signifi cantly reduced
turnover among store employees. Customer satisfaction also
rose. These improvements contributed to an increase in our
market share to nearly 21 percent in the United States and
more than 35 percent in Canada, where our Best Buy and
Future Shop stores offer the consumer a choice of brands. We
also saw continued strong consumer response to our stores in
China, which together with our success in Canada gives us
further optimism that our international expansion provides a
huge runway for future growth.
Our fi nancial performance also saw improvements.
Diluted earnings per share rose to $3.12 in fi scal 2008,
up 12 percent from $2.79 the prior year. Our EPS growth
was driven primarily by the lower average number of shares
outstanding, resulting from $3.5 billion of share repurchases
in fi scal 2008. Our results also refl ected an 11-percent rise
in revenue, to $40 billion—a major milestone, representing
a near doubling of revenue from fi ve years ago. Our
comparable store sales in the United States were affected
by a consumer slow-down in our fi scal fourth quarter,
muting our overall results. We fi nished at the low end of
our expectations described in last year’s annual report—
which was a disappointment to me—but I am very proud
of our results, given what turned out to be a much more
challenging environment than expected. On balance, fi scal
2008 was another year in which the performance of our
150,000 employees provided reason for us to believe in
a bright future for Best Buy.
Connecting the digital world
The core of our story, as we look to the future, is based
on the hypothesis that we live in an age when technology
is producing transformative change, enabling people to
accomplish more with their lives than could have been
dreamed possible two or three decades ago. We believe
that to realize the many potential benefi ts of these changes,
our customers will need a friend who can help them enable
their dreams of digital connectivity—and that we will be
that friend, through the talents of our employees. We believe
consumers in the connected world will use technology to
enrich their lifestyles in a tremendous variety of ways, which
will challenge our capacity to serve them as never before.
The capabilities we have in our stores, service departments,
call centers, Web sites, in-home solutions and product
delivery all will have to work together at the command of
our employees who directly engage with our consumers. Last,
based on our research, we believe consumers’ need for this
trusted perspective on technology is global.