HMVs E-business Performance - Case Study Example

During the early years, HMV was a brand name known to every music lover and became synonymous to music retailing. This helped HMV to expend its base out of London to all most every corner of Britain. The first major period growth came in the sixties, when fifteen new stores were opened in grater London and south east and then again in the following years it becomes customary affair for HMV. Store sizes of HMV have been increasing to accommodate the vast range of music videos, computer games etc.

In October, 1998, this process culminated in the opening of HMV in new 50,000 sq feet flagship store at 150 Oxford Street, listed by the Guinness book of records at the time as the world's largest record store. In later years, HMV continued to launch its flagship standard superstores all over UK. The UK based chain was also able to successfully export the branch to the rest of the world and retail chains were established in North America &South East - Asia. HMV continued to lead the way in music retailing into the millennium and launch HMV - direct in 1992, its mail order operation and in 1997, its own website WWW.hmv.co.

uk shows its commitment towards adopting new technologies and to cater the opportunities which lie ahead. Now HMV has developed into one of the world's leading ret. HMV is dedicated to provide its customers the widest range possible of music, films and games across all formats. Recently, the music industry specially has seen the revolution in the form of digital music which has the capacity to be offered at any time, anywhere in the world through number of channels. This has increased capability to reach out vast number of audiences.

"Electronic commerce is often thought simply to refer to buying and selling using the Internet; people immediately think of consumer retail purchases from companies. But e-commerce involved much more than electronically mediated financial transactions between organization and customers. Many commentators refer to e-commerce as all electronically mediated transaction between an organization and any third party it deals with. By this definition, non-financial transaction such as customers' requests for further information would also be considered to be part of e-commerce (Chaffey, 2004).

The HMV group operates form approximately 680 shops in 7 countries and total retail floor space of 3.6 million square feet. For the full year ended April 2007, HMV group had a turnover of 1,894.5 million pound and operating profit of 57.3 million pound. HMV UK & Ireland sold 78 million CD & DVD units and water stone's 58 million books in the financial year ended April 2007. The acquisition of Ottakar's for 62.9 million pound brought together two businesses similar to each other i.e. book selling and music, video & games selling.

Waterstone and Ottakar are both specialists offering a wide range of titles. This step has been taken by the company to accommodate customers' requirements. Book selling in UK has been impacted by intensifying competition form