No. 3 European CE retailer Darty sees improvement in the 6 months ending 31 October 2014, with revenues growing by 3.5% Y-o-Y as the retailer continues to narrow focus on its core France, Belgium and Netherlands businesses.

In part such improvements come through the sale of majority stake in Datart, the retail business in Czech Republic and Slovakia. It also dropped loss-making operations in Italy, Spain and Turkey. As a result net losses for the 6-month period reach €4.7 million, an improvement from €19.8m last year, while operating profit totals €9.3m (against a €1m loss a year ago).

However sales drop by 1.2% due to "strong comparatives in Q2" and a "challenging" market.

A recent set of job listings confirm Apple plans to open a flagship Store in Brussels, Belgium-- a first for the country, if one still to be confirmed by the iPhone maker.

The retail-specific job listings total 13, and include a Manager, Expert and Genius, among others.

As mentioned earlier the actual location of the store is unknown, but according to Belgium-iPhone it will be in "The Golden Fleece," a complex currently under construction at Toison d'Or (Golden Fleece), Brussels. Apparently the Apple Store is located on the right-hand side of the building, spans around 1500 square metres and includes a mezzanine.

Best Buy bids farewell to its Chinese dreams as its sells its Five Star operation to the Juayuan Group, a Chinese real estate company in the name of focusing on the home N. American market.

The financial details of the sale are not available, but the Wall Street Journal speculates it cost around $300 million.

“The sale of Five Star does not suggest any similar action in Canada or Mexico," Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly insists. "Instead, it allows us to focus even more on our North American business. We will also continue to invest in and grow our China-based private label operations, with brand names that include Dynex, Insignia, Modal, Platinum and Rocketfish.”

Reportedly to blame for the exit are a slumping Chinese real estate sector causing declines in home appliance acquisitions, as well as an all too crowded market.

The "Black Friday" retail phenomenon arrives in our side of the globe, as more retailers embrace the pre-Christmas shopping extravaganza-- and the customer brawls and near riots it brings about.

Friday 31 November saw eager customers scrambling, if not fighting, for the chance to snap up low(er) cost TVs and consoles, as an estimated 65% of UK retailers, including the likes of Dixons, Argos, Tesco and John Lewis, planned Black Friday promotions. And we mean "fighting" in the most literal sense, as Reuters reports police were called in to control crowds in London, Manchester, Cardiff and Glasgow.

"There was a fight in the queue in front of us," one shopper says.

Other European nations are getting into the Black Friday spirit as well, as Spanish retailer El Corte Ingles used the term to promote discounts in France and Denmark.

Best Buy's "Renew Blue" strategy appears to be working as the retailer reports better-than-expected fiscal Q3 2015 results with revenues growing by 0.6% Y-o-Y to $9.4 billion through 2.2% Y-o-Y sales growth.

Further growth for the retailer comes from online retail, as it reports online sales growth of 21.6% Y-o-Y, up from 15% seen in the previous year. Also helping were budget cuts worth around $1 billion.

“In Q3 our teams delivered positive comparable sales, improved profitability and continued progress in our Renew Blue transformation," Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly says.

Phones 4U owes a number of creditors £168 million in various debts, The Telegraph reports-- debts the retailer will only pay very little of (if at all) following its controversial collapse last September.

For the curious, the above mentioned includes £78m in taxes (as divided between £69.2m in VAT and £8.8m in corporation tax), £4.8m in customer refunds, £42m to suppliers, £25.9 to employees and £17.2m in unpaid bills.

And here's the fun (or not, if you're a Phones 4U creditor) part-- according to administrators PwC only 0.4%, or £6720000, of the debt will be repaid. The retailer is currently raising funds through the sale of shops, and made £15m from the sale of 198 outlets to EE and Vodafone, but 365 shops remain closed.

In a surprise announcement Amazon reveals what is surely its oddest product yet-- the Echo, a black cylindrical speaker that is actually cloud-powered, voice-controlled, always-on virtual assistant.

Essentially the Eco is a lot like Apple's Siri, but within a piece of hardware. It promises room-filling sound via 360-degree speaker, and carries 7 microphones paired with beam-forming technology and "enhanced" noise canceling to hear speakers from any direction, even while it is playing music.

As for actual functionality, an adorably awkward video shows the various uses the Echo can find, such as assistant duties (wake up alarms, shopping lists, reminders, news, weather information), the answering of queries via Wikipedia, unit conversion, music playback (from Amazon Music Library, Prime Music, TuneIn and iHeartRadio). Powering all is the Amazon cloud, to which the Eco connects via mobile device and companion Echo app.

Media-Saturn announces the Electronics Online Group (EOG), essentially a bundle of all its online pure-play activities with redcoon at its core and German comparison portal Idealo founder Martin Sinner as CEO.

According to the retailer the EOG will focus on growth via acquisitions and new online concepts, such as specialist web shops offering "hot trends" such as wearables and other future devices. Each pure-play concept will have own positioning in terms of pricing, product range, services and lifestyle relevance, and thus target different customer segments.

"In addition to Media Markt and Saturn's online activities, we also want to make our mark on the online pure-play market," Media-Saturn CEO Pieter Haas says. "Based on the Media-Saturn Group's purchasing power and redcoon's logistics in Erfurt, we see major growth opportunities for pure players like redcoon but also for new online concepts and acquisitions in this sector."