Old phones spark boom

A Wolverhampton entrepreneur is building one of the country's fastest growing businesses selling old mobile phones to new owners in Eastern Europe and the Third World.

As new phones and products are introduced in the UK and on the Continent, older models are discarded which used to leave phone companies with the major headache and expense of disposing of the obsolete equipment

This is where Steve Athwal and Euro Communications Distribution (ECD) step in.

Based in two units on Wednesfield's Culwell Trading Estate, the firm buys obsolete and redundant mobile phones from the major networks and exports them to wholesalers and distributors from Poland to South Africa.

As well as building up his own business, Steve has been able to offer phone companies a way to replace their disposal costs with a new source of revenue.

In one deal recently Steve won a bid for 1,800 old mobiles, which he bought from a British network operators. After testing and grading them he sold them on at a profit to an Algerian dealer.

Deals like that have helped Steve and his 15-strong workforce boost sales at the firm by 69 per cent a year from £1 million in 2004/5 to £3 million in 2005/6.

Those figures helped propel ECD to 65th place in the Sunday Times Tech Track list of the 100 fastest growing private technology, telecoms and digital media companies in Britain.

The firm has gone on to hit £4.3 million turnover in the year just gone, is on track to hit £5 million this year and Steve has his eye on a target of £6 million in 2008/9.

Still only 35, Steve, born and bred in Park Village in Wolverhampton, launched ECD in 1999. But he had been working in the telecoms industry since he was 19, putting himself through university while selling mobile phones.

After university he launched a phone sales shop with a business partner, but soon realised the growth in firms like Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone opening their own retail stores would soon squeeze out small local operators.

"While running the stores we did a deal with a couple of African guys who bought a load of obsolete phones to sell back home, and that gave me the idea," said Steve. "I split with my partner and in 1999 set up ECD, buying obsolete equipment from British networks and selling them on to Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong and the Third World.

"But it has become a very competitive and fast-moving market. the guys in Hong Kong now bid for phones themselves, and in the last three or four years I have been dealing a lot more with Eastern Europe.

"We are about to expand into new premises which will mean us taking on another ten people over the next couple of years, and I intend to recruit people who speak Russian and Polish so we can overcome the language barrier. It is a very wide market at the moment. The Africans tend to want basic models which sell for around 20 US dollars apiece, while 99 per cent of old Blackberries go back into the USA and Canada."

At ECD's headquarters the team assess all the phones, accessories and data cards, carry out any repairs and then export them. The firm is currently processing around 2,000 phones a week.

"We have to tender for every job lot of old equipment," explained Steve. "Speed is of the essence – a few days can make a major difference to the price you can get for the phones. It's a bit like the Stock Market with its ups and downs.

"But it is tremendously exciting. We are all really passionate about the business and a lot of the people with me have been there from the start and share that enthusiasm. I couldn't have got where the business is today without them.

"The move to our new premises in the New Year is going to give us an even bigger boost – we really outgrew our current place a few years ago. It's a really exciting time."