GameStop's moment of truth: the first earnings report since January’s big stock pop

Ready gamer one... GameStop just dropped its first earnings report since its big stock pop. ICYMI (unlikely): from December to late January, GameStop shares surged 1,000%. Since their January 27th all-time high, shares have fallen 48% — but are still up nearly 2,000% over the past six months. Without further ado.... here are the numbers for the three months ended January 30:

• -3%: GameStop's quarterly sales dipped 3% from 2019 to $2.1B — slightly lower than Wall Street estimates.
• ~4X: Profit nearly quadrupled to $81M, but that was mostly thanks to a $70M tax benefit. And it was still much less than analysts expected.
• +175%: The brightest spot in GameStop's earnings was ecommerce sales, which nearly 3X'd in the quarter and made up a third of total sales.

Less "Blockbuster of video games"... more "Amazon of video games." That's the strategy GameStop is going for in 2021. In 2020, it closed ~700 of its 5K stores. Now, it’s leaning on new leaders to change course:

• In January, GameStop added former Chewy CEO Ryan Cohen (and two of his Chewy pals) to its board. Some investors hope the Chewy ecommerce experts can make GameStop less mall-retailer, more digital shop.
• In February, GameStop appointed Matt Francis, a former Amazon Web Services engineering leader, as its first-ever chief technology officer in charge of ecommerce and tech.