GameStop Sued by BCG Over $30 Million Bill to Fix Company

Article

GameStop Corp.’s stockholders may be enjoying the biggest rally of the year, but not everyone is happy.

Boston Consulting Group claims it hasn’t been paid about $30 million in fees for its work “setting the company on a more sustainable path” 2 1/2 years ago.

The management consultant says that after it was hired in 2019 to bring GameStop out of a slump, a plan was agreed on to overhaul the business, including the video game and pre-owned electronics operations.

Boston Consulting spent “tens of thousands of hours” on the project and “overachieved” by creating more profit improvement opportunities than were initially estimated, according to the complaint filed Tuesday in Delaware federal court.

GameStop said it will fight the suit, which it said lacks merit and reflects BCG’s “prioritization of excessive fees over clients’ interests.”

“It is confounding that the high-priced consultants at BCG claim to have delivered hundreds of millions in value for GameStop during a period when share price, sales and debt were at perilous levels,” GameStop said in an emailed statement.

The lawsuit doesn’t get into how GameStop has churned through a variety of business concepts in recent years with mixed reactions from investors and customers. There’s also no mention that in January 2021, a social media-driven trading frenzy drove its stock price up more than 1,000% in a revolt against hedge funds betting against the company.

Instead, Boston Consulting alleges that under the management of the retailer’s chief financial officer at the time, invoices went unpaid “despite there being no legitimate dispute over BCG’s full performance and the fees coming due.”

GameStop said it isn’t in “our stockholders’ best interests to pay the tens of millions of dollars sought by BCG, especially given their seemingly meager impact on the company’s bottom line.”