Best Buy Co., Inc. (NYSE:BBY) Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

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And so we would expect that to continue. To your second question, as you look at next year, at this point, we’re not guiding next year, but we would expect product margins to be somewhat of a neutral impact to next year. Overall, we don’t, at this point, see a lot of material changes either way. We have a very strong relationship with our vendors, and they are obviously as interested in us in stimulating sales and showcasing their products and innovations that they have. So at this point, we don’t see any change to that as we look into next year.

Corie Barry: Matt hit on this, but I want to underscore, the way in which our vendors participate with us varies as you would expect, depending on what we’re seeing in the macro. Sometimes that shows up as more promotional partnership. But a lot of times, that shows up in very different ways it can be in how we think about specialized labor, it can be in store experiences like we mentioned on the call, it can be in our Best Buy ads business or in supply chain fulfillment or in services. And I think what’s important is our overall level of invested support has grown in the aggregate even as we compare it to pre-pandemic levels. And I think that is the part that for us as important is how can we be the very best partner to our vendors as we collectively want to bring, especially some of this newer innovation to market.

Steven Forbes: Thank you, Corie and Matt. Maybe just a quick follow-up for you, Corie. Any updated thoughts on maybe some of your newer growth initiatives such as device life cycle management, really just trying to think through whether the current sort of operating performance or challenges that are out there are impacting the investments you plan to put behind some of these initiatives? Or whether that’s still sort of a growth sort of plan for next year?

Corie Barry: Yeah. As it relates — you hit on specifically device life cycle management, I’m maybe going to take it up one level and that is, we’ve talked about Geek Squad as a service, because it can be everything from device cycle management, which is newer side of this, but also just providing service on behalf of vendors as you think about being an Apple authorized service provider or some of our Best Buy business offerings where we actually use our service profile to go out and do installations writ large. What’s nice about an initiative like this is it doesn’t require, especially in the earlier stages, much incremental investment. We already have Geek Squad City, which is a very large facility, well staffed with trained experts who we can leverage some of their capacities in order to deliver on something like device life cycle management.

Now then we can make decisions as something like that ramps. We didn’t mention it this quarter because in Q4, honestly, it’s not the biggest front and center area of focus. But you can also imagine behind the scenes, if there are other ways for us to leverage our existing expertise and capacity. Those are very interesting strategic initiatives for us. And we remain excited about this one. We remain excited about the pipeline that we’re seeing in this one. And obviously, I think you can expect that we will update you with more clarity as it develops. So with that, I think that — thank you. I think that is our last question, and I want to thank you all for joining us today. Thank you for the nice wishes. I hope you all also have a wonderful holiday, and we look forward to updating you all on our results and progress during our next call in February.

Thank you, and have a great day.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.

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