Pioneering Barnes & Noble Leader to Step Down
April 27 2016 - 1:20AM
Dow Jones News
Book retailer Leonard Riggio said in an interview Tuesday that
he will step down as executive chairman of Barnes & Noble Inc.,
following the company's annual meeting scheduled for September.
"I'm no longer going to be in charge," Mr. Riggio said. "I'm
done with that. I'm done with being top banana."
Mr. Riggio, who built Barnes & Noble into the nation's
largest bookstore chain, said he played an active role last fall in
the hiring of the company's current chief executive, Ronald
Boire.
The 75-year-old Mr. Riggio began to pull back in January. "I
found peace with my decision," he said. "The whole identity crisis
comes in. 'Who am I? How do I leave here?' All that stuff comes
into your head after you spend so many years in one place."
Mr. Riggio is the company's largest individual shareholder with
a 17.5% stake. He says he has no plans to sell or add to his
stockholdings. Mr. Riggio, who resigned as the company's CEO in
2002, will remain on the board after stepping down as executive
chairman.
The move by Mr. Riggio comes after a career in retail spanning
more than half a century—one that made his name synonymous with
superstores with huge offerings of titles, popular cafes and
inviting magazine newsstands.
Barnes & Noble, however, never duplicated its success with
its online bookstore or its offering of Nook digital devices and
e-books. Instead, rival Amazon.com Inc. today dominates the sale of
physical books online as well as the sale of digital e-books. Most
recently, Amazon opened a retail store in Seattle and is planning a
second for La Jolla.
As Amazon's share of the book business increased, Barnes &
Noble's store count decreased to 640 today from a peak of 726 for
the fiscal year ended January 2009.
Sales at the retail segment, which includes the consumer stores
and BN.com, have fallen 20% to $4.11 billion for the fiscal year
ended May 2015 compared with the fiscal year ended January 2009, in
part because of the impact of digital books.
Barnes & Noble's big bet that it could compete as a
high-powered technology company head-to-head with Amazon and Apple
Inc. also proved a disappointment. Through the first nine months
ended Jan. 31, Nook revenue fell 29% to $150 million.
Paul Guenther, a board member since 2015, will serve as Barnes
& Noble's nonexecutive chairman. Mr. Boire, Barnes &
Noble's chief executive, will report to the full board.
Mr. Riggio, a philanthropist and art collector, said he has many
outside interests that will occupy him after he steps down. "I
still dream about stuff," he said during the interview.
Mr. Riggio opened a college bookstore in Greenwich Village in
1965 and acquired Barnes & Noble, then a single store in
Manhattan, in 1971. After buying the B. Dalton Bookseller mall
chain, Mr. Riggio later committed Barnes & Noble to a strategy
of opening superstores, helping to drive the growth of the
country's largest book publishers.
Mr. Riggio took Barnes & Noble public in 1993 but continued
to own and operate the college-bookstore group as a separate
private business.
That changed in 2009, when Barnes & Noble bought the college
group, a move intended to provide some additional financial
cushioning for the retail stores. The college business was spun off
as an independent publicly traded company called Barnes & Noble
Education Inc. in 2015.
Barnes & Noble is expected to open a new prototype store
later this summer, one of four that the chain will launch open
during the fiscal year ended April 2017.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 27, 2016 01:05 ET (05:05 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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