JB Hi-Fi reports strongest 6 months ever with huge online sales

The past sixth months has been a doozy for many, but apparently not for retailer JB HI-Fi.

The company recently reported it’s strongest six months ever, largely thanks to sales around computers and games.

The report covers (via Kotaku) the first sixth months of the 2021 - 2022 financial year, during which the company made $3.36 billion in sales. These numbers show growth of over 23% in total sales and 22.7% uptick in gross profit.

A lot of this is thanks to an expected drive in online sales, which the company reports have grown by 161.7% representing 13.7% of the total sales, or $678.8 million dollars.

These numbers get even bigger given that since the acquisition in 2016, JB HiFi now also owns The Good Guys which also saw similar growth across many of the same categories.

Items like small electronics, computers, and TVs saw a boon in sales, but the company did also report a downswing of 5.6% in software sales. The report states this is almost entirely due to a drop in movies, while games, music, and other software actually grew in sales.

In the current climate of streaming services, it’s no surprise to see that films and TV perhaps aren’t doing so well in the retail space. Especially when you consider the rise of Disney Plus and all the films that are just realising straight to services lately. It’s less and less common for people to even have something connected to their TVs that can play discs.

Even many modern consoles aren’t doing it like the cool party Xbox Series S. However, being in Australia it may be smarter to still stick with disc editions if you’re in the market.

Aside from the potential death of watchable physical media, these numbers means JB-HiFi is doing really well, so it seems like an odd boast to say they managed to keep paying folks during the pandemic. But it’s still nice that they did, without receiving government wage subsidies.

There was also no real mention of stock and ordering difficulties with the new consoles, or the little gift card mishap from last year. There are several nonspecific notes in the document about focussing on better integration of online and ecommerce but nothing concrete about how they might tackle such problems in the future.

But also, that kind of thing really doesn’t seem to be JB Hi-Fi’s problem right now. Not when they’re rolling in all those fat stacks of cash.