But its clock has finally run out.
RadioShack, a long-ailing 94-year-old electronics chain, filed for bankruptcy protection on Thursday after striking a deal to sell up to 2,400 of its stores to the wireless service provider Sprint and a hedge fund that is its biggest shareholder.
The Chapter 11 filing, made in federal bankruptcy court in Delaware, took few unaware. RadioShack had not turned a profit since 2011, and its fate had been a regular topic of speculation in the retail and corporate restructuring circles.
“The surprise is that they survived this long,” said Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities. “I didn’t think they’d last through Christmas 2013.”
But RadioShack is poised to live on, at least in much diminished form. Sprint and the hedge fund Standard General agreed to buy 1,500 to 2,400 of RadioShack’s 4,000 company-owned stores in the United States. Sprint is expected to run special “store within a store” departments in up to 1,750 of those stores.
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Radio Shack’s Chapter 11 petition
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