FY20, sales are still up 21.7 per cent.  It’s also the first six-month-period presented by returning chief executive Terry Smart, who said he is thankful the business has such a great team to back him up.  Smart was the CEO of JB Hi-Fi until 2014, when he retired, and rejoined the business as CEO of The Good Guys in 2017. And, when JB’s former CEO Richard Murray announced his move to Premier Retail last year, Smart took the top job. “It’s obviously been a pretty challenging period: it hasn’t been an ideal period to take up a leadership role,” Smart told Inside Retail.  “But [the transition] has gone very smoothly. The environment wasn’t easy, but the transition was.” Supply chain pressures and the tail-end of the Delta wave impacted the group’s operations, which stumbled across most financial measures, but by the end of Monday the business’ share price had risen by almost $2 to almost $52 per share – the highest it has been in about a year. This could be because the business intends to return around $250 million to shareholders through an off-market buy-back of ordinary shares. The buy-back, announced on Monday, is expected to reduce the amount of shares on offer in total and improve earnings per share, and is coming about because the business has “surplus capital”.  Pandemic proves online strategy It could also be due to the fact that the business seems to have largely weathered the pandemic well. “JB has the same unenviable task that many retailers have of ‘comping’ the enormous sales numbers delivered in the first year of the pandemic. All things considered, it has turned in another great performance,” Craig Flanders, chief executive of Melbourne advertising agency Spinach, told Inside Retail. “They’ve been rewarded for prior and continued commitment and investment into a first-class online sales portal, and attendant distribution and delivery improvements. This has allowed JB to take advantage of the shift to online purchases.” JB Hi-Fi’s total online sales hit $1.1 billion for the year, showing 62.6 per cent growth over the same period last year and making up almost 23 per cent of total sales.  During the six month period, the business continued investing in its online, upgraded its website and distribution network, and expanded its delivery options to keep customers content – maintaining a fairly high level of customer service and on-time delivery during a period of “significantly increased volume”.  “What Covid-19 has done for the business is not only prove our online strategy, but strengthen it,” said Smart.  “We’ve been able to learn a lot during the half [about online], and we can put that into play moving forward. It’ll help us create new ways of reaching customers, such as our dedicated phone sales department [created during lockdown].” That’s not to say everything went to plan during the last six months, however. The business’ net-zero emissions plan has been knocked off track by the continuing pandemic, with only 10 out of the 15 stores planned to utilise solar power generation onsite completed by the end of 2021.  “It’s been a little problematic, of course, as everything has been with Covid, but we’re planning on working with landlords to get the proper approvals [for further stores],” Smart said.  “It just requires a lot of technical work to get done, but landlords have been very supportive of it.” Workplace culture “definitely a focus” Smart also said that JB Hi-Fi has continued to action a set of diversity and inclusion initiatives to foster a more inclusive leadership team, as well as focus on employee safety with mental health and wellbeing training programs. Last year, the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union (RAFFWU) developed a report detailing a culture of gender discrimination and sexual harassment at JB Hi-Fi.  In response, the retailer has implemented a number of new programs and initiatives to improve its workplace culture. The business released a ‘group diversity and inclusion action plan’ with a focus on increasing the number of women in leadership positions across JB Hi-Fi and The Good Guys, and reviewed and improved its workplace behaviour policy.  “It’s definitely a focus for us,” Smart said. “We’ve just got to keep working at it, we’ve got lots of programs in place [and] have done significant training in both our stores and support office.” However, RAFFWU secretary Josh Cullinan told Inside Retail JB has so far failed to formally respond to the issues raised in the report, but that the electronics giant has purported to have processes in place to prevent the issues from occurring again and called on staff members to raise issues individually.  According to Cullinan, JB also asked for identifying information about anonymous respondents to the survey, which RAFFWU refused to give.