After GameStop closed about a quarter of its locations within the past year, shuttering 1,000 stores across the world, the company said it’s not close to done. And as the struggling company closes stores, it will invest cash in cryptocurrencies.
GameStop revealed in a regulatory filing Tuesday that it expects to close a “significant number” of additional locations in the coming months, although the “specific set of stores has not been identified for closure.”
A majority of the closures occurred in its biggest market, the United States, with 590 locations shutting down and reducing its store count to 2,325 as of February 1. More than 330 locations closed across Europe, plus nearly 50 stores in Canada and Australia.
Globally, 3,203 GameStops remain — down drastically from its peak of about 6,000 a decade ago.
GameStop has closed hundreds of stores over the past several years because it has struggled to adapt to customers’ changing habits of buying games online and streaming. The company was also center of the “meme stock” craze in 2021, which briefly boosted its stock.
GameStop joins a number of other well-known retailers closing stores or completely disappearing, including Joann, Forever 21, Kohl’s and Macy’s. Among the reasons contributing to the retail exodus is continuing inflationary pressure on consumers’ wallets, pressure from private equity and retailers not quickly adapting to changing shopping habits.
As part of GameStop’s pivot away from retail, the company also said that it’s getting into bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset, announcing that a “portion of our cash or future debt and equity issuances” might be invested in the digital currency.
“The pivot to bitcoin is really a defense against irrelevance,” Neil Saunders, an analyst at GlobalData Retail told CNN, adding that it’s “an odd thing as it’s basically saying the strategy isn’t retail but to act as some kind of cryptocurrency investment vehicle.”
Nevertheless, the crypto announcement helped juice the stock: GameStop (GME) shares soared 16% in premarket trading Wednesday.