The new senior management team at HMV have only been in place for a couple of weeks, but already they are blaming poor recent trading on “a lack of new releases”…and predicting a strong pick-up at Christmas. Is this credible?

To be fair, consumers are stimulated to buy when popular new DVDs, albums and video games are released and there is no doubt that during the Olympics the big entertainment suppliers didn’t try and compete with the absorbing TV spectacle by pointlessly releasing new products.

The problem is that HMV have “form” when it comes to talking about the strength of the new release pipeline, so cynicism is inevitable when listening to today’s promises that things will pick up. After the World Cup two years ago HMV blamed “a lack of new releases” for the 15% fall in LFL sales that they reported at this point, but things didn’t pick up, and Christmas was still awful for HMV, with LFL sales turning out to be 14% down in 2010.

Given the inexorable structural downtrend in the physical markets for entertainment, nobody should expect a big uplift in LFL sales at HMV, but to be off by 11.6% over the last 20 weeks is disappointing, even if market share is up.

HMV are now getting better margins and payment terms from their suppliers, but they will need to do much better than that on the top-line if they are to meet the £10m profit forecast for this financial year that they were confidently predicting in early August.

What happened to the expected benefit to HMV’s sales from the store revamps and the new Technology drive? The “portable digital technology” market is booming, particularly in tablet PC’s, and HMV has got a foothold here, thankfully.

But what happened to the benefit that HMV should have had from the poor summer weather? This was a great summer for “indoor” products, but there is no mention of that in today’s statement. It wasn’t a great summer for outdoor music festivals, however, which may be why the planned sale of the rest of the HMV Live division is taking so long to conclude, by the way.

Given its still sizeable debt, HMV’s bank may yet have to “release” it from its misery after Christmas, if trading remains poor, but hope does spring eternal and let’s hope that HMV does manage to recover. Unfortunately, there will probably be so many new entertainment releases coming out in December, after the summer lull, that the best new DVD’s etc will get crowded out and lost in the wash.

And no doubt many of us will simply end up buying our cheap Christmas DVD and CD gifts in the supermarkets (which happily sell new releases for almost zero profit to generate footfall), bypassing HMV. Unless somebody starts a “Save HMV by shopping there this Christmas” campaign…