SEATTLE, 2015-2-19 — /EPR Retail News/ — Best Buy, the world’s leading consumer electronics retailer, will accelerate and fuel its rapidly expanding e-commerce and mobile development capabilities by opening a technology development center in Seattle.
The development center will open in late spring 2015 in the booming, tech-centric South Lake Union area of Seattle and will focus on mobile development, private cloud and omnichannel-application development. It will employ more than 50 engineers, product managers, web architects and developers in the next year and is expected to expand to more than 100 e-commerce professionals over time.
The development center will be located on the top floor of The Seattle Times headquarters building and will play an important role in the growth of Best Buy – with particular focus on how digital technology will drive a comprehensive customer experience and growth in all channels. With more than 1,400 stores in the United States and an e-commerce site that has seen rapid expansion for more than three consecutive years, Best Buy has the ability to turn ideas into reality, do it quickly and do it at scale.
“Establishing this development office is significant for BestBuy.com,” said Mary Lou Kelley, President, E-commerce for Best Buy. “The work done in this office will lead the transformation of the omnichannel experience for our customers. We intend for our colleagues in this office to drive breakthrough innovation at incredible scale – for the world’s largest consumer electronics retailer.”
The work in Seattle will supplement the work of the e-commerce and enterprise IT teams in Minneapolis. The Seattle development center will focus on talented individuals with backgrounds and skills to drive transformational innovation. Recruiting for the new positions is in progress. Best Buy currently has more than 150 full-time e-commerce engineers and product managers in Minnesota, as well as several hundred contract employees.
An initial group of about 30 job listings for the Seattle office will be posted Wednesday at www.bestbuy-jobs.com.
BestBuy.com’s e-commerce experience has undergone a major transformation over the past two years. It is focused on leading-edge development technologies, leveraging cloud technologies and practices to support increased scale and the rapid growth of e-commerce traffic from mobile devices. In addition, the e-commerce team successfully deployed an OpenStack cloud internally last year.
Best Buy has received a sizeable award of $200,000 for the development center from Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s strategic reserve fund.
“Best Buy is an exciting addition to Washington state’s powerful community of e-commerce and mobile technology innovators here in the Cloud Capital of the World,” Inslee said. “We’re proud to have this dynamic, leading-edge company bringing great jobs and drawing on the talents of our outstanding tech workforce, which numbers more than 176,000, including some of the best cloud-application developers anywhere.”
Seattle Mayor Ed Murray applauded the move.
“Best Buy chose Seattle because we have the talent and the business environment that will help the company prosper,” Murray said. “The continued growth of e-commerce is a huge boost to our local economy and puts the city at the hub of the new global economy.”
The 32,000-square-foot office is being subleased from The Seattle Times.
About Best Buy
Best Buy Co., Inc. is the world’s largest consumer electronics retailer, offering advice, service and convenience – at competitive prices – to the consumers who visit its websites and stores more than 1.5 billion times each year. In the United States, more than 70 percent of Americans are within 15 minutes of a Best Buy store. Additionally, the company operates businesses in Canada and Mexico. Altogether, Best Buy employs more than 130,000 people and earns annual revenues of more than $40 billion.
Forward-Looking a Cautionary Statements:
This release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 as contained in Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 that reflect management’s current views and estimates regarding future market conditions, company performance and financial results, business prospects, new strategies, the competitive environment and other events. You can identify these statements by the fact that they use words such as “anticipate,” “believe,” “assume,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “project,” “guidance,” “plan,” “outlook,” and other words and terms of similar meaning. These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the potential results discussed in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause such differences include: uncertainties regarding the expected benefits from the center; our ability to attract and retain qualified employees and other risks and uncertainties, including those detailed from time to time in the registrant’s periodic reports (whether under the caption Risk Factors or Forward-Looking Statements or elsewhere). Best Buy assumes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statement, except as otherwise required by law.