GameStop (GME) – Get Report shares skyrocketed on Wednesday as investors reacted to the videogame retailer’s recently named board members and encouraging holiday sales results.
Shares of the Grapevine, Texas, company at last check climbed 68% to $33.45.
Earlier this week, the retailer reached an agreement with RC Ventures to place three of the New York activist investor’s nominees — Alan Attal, Ryan Cohen and Jim Grube — on the board.
A statement from GameStop said the three executives have “deep expertise in e-commerce, online marketing, finance and strategic planning.”
The addition of Cohen and the other new directors is positive given their success at Chewy (CHWY) – Get Report and vision to “make GameStop a more digitally focused retailer,” Telsey analyst Joseph Feldman wrote in a Tuesday note, according to Bloomberg.
Cohen is the manager of RC Ventures and co-founder of pet-supplies specialist Chewy.com, which was purchased by PetSmart in 2017 for $3.35 billion.
In November RC Ventures urged the company to conduct a strategic review of its business and focus on digital sales.
The firm in a December Securities and Exchange Commission filing expressed willingness to get more involved with the company “to produce the best results for all shareholders.”
The company also reported a quadrupling in e-commerce sales during the nine-week holiday shopping season. The figure accounted for about 34% of total sales.
E-commerce sales year to date moved past $1.35 billion, GameStop said, exceeding the company’s $1 billion target. Comparable-store sales rose 4.8%
GameStop said in a statement that it had seen “unprecedented demand for recently launched gaming consoles, and while consumer demand far outpaced constrained supply in the nine-week period, the company believes these products will drive sales well into 2021 as console availability from our suppliers improves later in the year.”