The Top 500 bookseller also reports a 63.7% year-over-year drop in Nook device and accessories sales in its Q2 2015 earnings report.

Barnes & Noble announced in a U.S. Securities and Exchange filing today it is buying all of the shares in its struggling Nook division back from Microsoft for nearly $117 million at Barnes & Noble’s share price to start the trading day as overall device and digital content sales continued to slide.

Terms of the deal include Barnes & Noble paying $62.43 million in cash and 2,737,290 shares of common stock. Based on Barnes & Noble’s stock price of $19.85 when the trading day began, that would put the value at $54.34 million.

Nook device and accessories sales dropped 63.7% year over year in Q2 of fiscal 2015, contributing to a second straight down quarter for bookseller Barnes & Noble in fiscal 2015. It’s the second straight quarter that Nook sales have dropped significantly from the previous year, though the drop in Q2 wasn’t as steep as it was in Q1 2015, when device sales dropped 78.6% from the previous year.

In its Q2 2015 earnings report filed today, the retail chain reported sales of $63.9 million within the Nook division, which also includes digital content, down 41.3% from $108.7 million during the same period a year ago. The steep decline in device sales was mitigated somewhat by a less precipitous drop in digital content sales, which fell 21.2% from the same period last year to $41.2 million.

The company announced in June that it was planning on spinning off Nook from its retail business to create two separate, publicly traded companies. BarnesandNoble.com ranks No. 28 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.

advertisement

“Today’s announcement on the restructuring of the NOOK Media agreements will enable the Company to further rationalize the NOOK business and provide a clearer path for the potential separation of our Retail and NOOK Media businesses,” Barnes & Noble CEO Michael Huseby says.

For the quarter ending Nov. 1, Barnes and Noble also reported:

  • Sales in the company’s retail division, which includes BN.com, dropped 3.6% in Q2 2015, falling to $888.2 million from $921.0 million during the same period last year. The company does not break out online sales.
  • Overall sales for the company dropped 2.7% year over year, down to $1.688 billion in Q2 2015 from $1.734 billion during the same period last year.
Favorite