But business in todays saturated wireless market Forrester Research predicts that there will be more than 267 million unique cellphone and smartphone subscribers in the United States this year competition is fierce and margins are low. The pricing power is all with the wireless companies, and those wireless companies are all competing amongst themselves, said Mickey Chadha, a senior analyst at Moodys. RadioShack is reactive; they cant be proactive about pricing. The shift to smartphones also further cannibalized RadioShacks other inventory, lessening the need for digital cameras, GPS devices and the cables and cords that would connect devices. What RadioShack didnt do was they didnt reinvent themselves, said Mr. Schick of Stifel. There is often trouble in the water, he continued, if every year that goes by, you say youll manage. One effort in 2009 at reinvention, by shedding the antiquated Radio from the company name in an effort to rebrand itself as The Shack, was roundly mocked . (The company name dates back to 1921, when two brothers, Theodore and Milton Deutschmann, founded it in Boston to capitalize on amateur or ham and ship radio operators, and they named it Radio Shack after the wooden storage room used for radio equipment on a ship.) For the last year and a half, however, the company has been scrambling aggressively to right itself.
For the original version including any supplementary images or video, visit http://finance.yahoo.com/news/radioshack-rewiring-013738625.html