The format will be piloted at the Westfield London centre and aims to offer consumers help with all aspects of wireless technology, which founder Charles Dunstone believes will be as important to the business in this decade as phones were in the 1990s.
The 3,000 sq ft Westfield store is larger than a typical Carphone Warehouse outlet and will seek to build on the retailer’s success in the laptop market. It has gone from a standing start to 10 per cent market share in the space of a year on the back of subsidised and free laptops tied in with broadband connections.
Three other trial stores are planned, as well as an online presence, and elements will be rolled out to as many as 50 other stores.
Dunstone said the fast-growing games market was a big target area.
We’ve not done enough in gaming. It’s not just going to be home gaming, but also gaming on mobile phones,” he said.
The news came in the same week that Carphone revealed plans for its Best Buy Europe stores in the UK. It plans to have four or five stores by next summer and 100 by 2013. The stores will typically be 30,000 sq ft, compared with the 20,000 sq ft more common for Currys or Comet.
Dunstone told Retail Week that the initial stores could be much larger – even as big as 70,000 sq ft. “We want to make the first few stores very impactful,” he said.
Carphone Warehouse has also secured exclusive rights for the Google and the Nokia Comes with Music phones, along with Apple’s iPhone.
It revealed this week that second-quarter subscription connections were up 21 per cent to 1.3 million, with total connections up 9 per cent.
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