Best Buy’s CEO says she isn’t planning for a ‘full recession’ — and she’s not alone

• Best Buy CEO Corie Barry said Tuesday that she is "not planning for a full recession."
• Others, like Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM, have predicted a smaller recession.

In an earnings call Tuesday, Best Buy CEO Corie Barry said the company is "not planning for a full recession," and she's not the only one who thinks that could be the case.

"It's fair to say we're factoring in for softer demand, but we're not planning for a full recession," she said on the call.

"Consumer electronics over time is a stable industry. And the last two years have clearly underscored the importance of tech in people's lives," Barry added.

Daniel Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, told Insider that could be true.

"I think consumer tech has become more of a staple," he said, with "very firm spending patterns."

Best Buy beat Wall Street's expectations for fiscal first-quarter revenue and profit but lowered its guidance for the full year.

Its shares were up about 1% in recent Tuesday trading.

Several top CEOs and executives have already warned or worried that a dip is approaching, but a few, including Barry, have singled out the possibility of smaller sort of downturn on the horizon.

"I see something mild," said Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM, according to the Wall Street Journal. He said something similar on an earnings call in late April, per Seeking Alpha.

Krishna added that he is seeing a bit more prudence from his network, the Journal reported.

Mansoor Al Mahmoud, CEO of Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), also sees a milder downturn. "I'm not saying that we will not have a slowdown, I'm not saying that we might not have a recession, but if we have a recession, it will be a light recession," he told CNBC at the World Economic Forum's annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland.

The QIA manages the country's sovereign wealth fund.

Wells Fargo CEO Charles Scharf has said a downturn is pretty likely but that he hopes it will be "short and not all that deep," Insider reported.

Millennials, who have lived through two historic downturns, could be forgiven for being skeptical, but experts previously told Insider it is likely that this potentially approaching slump will be one of the first regular recessions since the early 1990s.

"The type of recession we're looking at is not like a serious, massive downturn in consumer spending across the board," Brett Ryan, senior US economist at Deutsche Bank, told Insider.