GameStop CFO and Executive Vice President Jim Bell will be resigning from the company. The search has begun to find his replacement, who will continue the company’s transformation. If a replacement can’t be found, the company’s Senior Vice President will temporarily take over the role.
According to IGN, Bell will leave GameStop on March 26 and will receive a severance bonus of $2.8 million because he resigned for “good reason,” although they haven’t specified exactly what that reason was. His replacement must have the “capabilities and qualifications to help accelerate GameStop’s transformation,” and the company will be looking at candidates from both inside and outside the company. If they haven’t managed to find a replacement by the time Bell leaves, Senior Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer Diana Jajeh will become CFO in the interim.
The company hasn’t had the best of fortunes in recent years, hence the transformation. Their sales figures have repeatedly shown losses and falling sales as other retailers like Amazon take over GameStop’s previous iron grip on the gaming market and gaming moves ever coser to an all-digital future. The company’s CEO George Sherman has been in charge since 2019, but before that they’d had four CEO’s in just two years. The company’s shares have even returned to a value of approximately $44 since Reddit caused chaos by inflating the stock values for a short time. Their transformation has since involved closing hundreds of stores, laying off staff, cutting salaries, and planning a move into cultural experiences, a move that was predictably impacted in a big way by the pandemic keeping everyone at home.
The cultural experiences would have allowed players to try out video and tabletop games before they bought them. Rumors even speculated retro consoles would have been available, with players able to purchase retro games from the stores too. Unfortunately Covid-19 has had an impact on those plans and social distancing has meant none of them have come to fruition. Only time will tell whether a new CFO will be able to help the company in the long run, but things aren’t looking too good for GameStop right now.
[Source: Globe Newswire, IGN]
