GameStop’s shares surge after announcing partnership with Microsoft

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In a recent press release, GameStop announced a multi-year partnership with Microsoft. The new partnership will make Microsoft’s cloud solutions an integral part of GameStop’s business. Furthermore, this partnership will make Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams the backbone for all of GameStop’s in-store and back-end solutions.

The expectations are that this partnership will turn around things for the better of the struggling GameStop enterprise.

As a result of the partnership, the 30,000 store associates will now have access to real-time information on product availability, promotions, pricing, subscriptions, insights about customer behavior, customer preferences, and so on. It is an extensive list of omnichannel insights that should boost GameStop’s business performance and sales.

GameStop in-store operators will also have access to Microsoft Surface devices to improve the in-store customer experience.

As part of the deal, GameStop will start offering Xbox All Access. Considering that the new Sony PlayStation and Xbox are coming out in the following month, GameStop expects that their release will drive extra traffic both toward their brick & mortar stores, as well as their e-commerce web site.

According to a Motley Fool stock advisor review, as a direct consequence of this news, GameStop’s stocks soared for almost 27%. The single biggest investor in GameStop, Ryan Cohen, even raised his stake to nearly 10%. He was quite vocal in the past to make GameStop more focused on e-commerce and less reliant on its physical stores.

From Microsoft’s perspective, this deal is another win for its growing cloud business. Plus, it is in line with the strategic partnerships they’ve been making with big companies such as GE, Adobe, and Pepsi.

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Editors’ Recommendations:

• If you want to preorder an Xbox console, maybe avoid GameStop
• Could consoles without disc drives signal GameStop’s demise?
• GameStop will now offer full refunds on games purchased within two days of release
• Sony is putting a stop to digital game codes being sold at retailers like GameStop

Deep Ballu