New master's voice at HMV

After six tough years at the helm of entertainment media retailer HMV, Simon Fox has decided to let someone else have a crack at completing the chain's transformation in the digital age.

Fox will be succeeded by Trevor Moor, who until recently was Chief Executive of cameras retailer Jessops, so he will have plenty of experience of running a company whose traditional business has been severely disrupted by the advent of the Internet.

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Although Fox has overseen a dramatic collapse in the share price of the company and the near demise of a business weighed down by heavy debts, he has made a decent fist of saving a company which before his arrival had allowed Internet retailers to sneak up on its blind side and steal its lunch.

Strategically, Fox spotted that the emphasis in music was moving over to the live scene rather than recorded music, where the phenomenal success of the download services of US titans Apple and Amazon bit hard into HMV's sales of CDs.

Unfortunately, the live music arm, as the only bit of the business enjoying growth, had to be sold off to save the rest of the company from collapsing under a mountain of debt.

While HMV's CD and DVD business took a battering from online rivals, its chain of Waterstone's book shops did so as well, only more so.

As consumers switched to the Internet to buy their music, films and books, HMV tried to transform itself at the hurry-up into a more hardware-focused business.

It may be all a case of "too little, too late" to save the iconic retailer but it has given the firm, which started out as "His Master's Voice" (derived from a painting of a dog listening to a gramophone record), a fighting chance to avoid going the way of Woolies, Our Price (later Zavvi) and GAME.

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