Quarterly financials are in for Barnes & Noble, and the bookseller announced this week that while fiscal first quarter 2014 losses did narrow, sales did go down in the first quarter of the new fiscal year.
With book buyers now opting for e-books as an alternative to traditional soft-bound and hard-bound books, Barnes & Noble has had a hard time keeping up with the times, even with products like the Nook e-reader. As it turned out, the Nook found itself against some tough competition, as Amazon’s Kindle e-readers and tablets dominated Barnes & Noble’s competing Nook devices; last quarter, the Nook space experienced a 54 percent decrease in revenue to $70 million, while the company’s digital content space took a 24 percent hit to $52 million in revenue.
All told, Barnes & Noble’s retail business experienced a 5.3 percent decline in revenue to $954.8 million in the recently-concluded fiscal Q1 2014, or the second quarter of the current calendar year. Net losses were down from $87 million in fiscal Q1 2013 to $28.4 million last quarter, while overall revenue was down to $1.24 billion, a decrease of 7 percent.
One reason for Barnes & Noble’s solid performance was cost-cutting initiatives such as releasing a co-branded Samsung Nook tablet based on the Galaxy Tab 4. According to CEO Michael Huseby, Barnes & Noble ” continued to improve our financial performance, while further executing on our strategic initiatives, including work on the proposed separation of the Barnes & Noble Retail and Nook Media businesses.”
Regarding Barnes & Noble’s eventual split, prepared comments from the retailer suggest that it is still weighing its options and considering the chance of some agreements being restructured. Barnes & Noble believes that this process of shopping around “could affect the structure and timing of the separation.”