
Electronics and appliance retailer Laox, a long-time denizen of Tokyo's Akihabara district, plans to drastically scale back its business by selling or shuttering all but two stores. Laox will spin off 15 outlets in the Tokyo metropolitan area into a new company in April, keeping its main shop and one other. Nojima Corp, another electronics retailer, will acquire that company and take on all store employees. The purchase price is likely to come to hundreds of millions of yen. Laox will close its remaining 12 suburban locations by the end of September and focus on a narrower range of products, mainly musical instruments. At its peak, Laox operated more than 100 stores and brought in sales of more than 210 billion yen. But fierce competition with big volume retailers has left it bruised and forecasting its eighth consecutive full-year net loss for fiscal 2008.