Old mobile phone turned into a cash cow

While Dow Jones American drawers and closets are flooded with discarded electronic devices such as old phones, more and more businesses are actively engaged in renovating and reselling the old stuff.　　ReCellular, one of America's largest mobile-phone companies, Stephen Manning, the company's chief executive, said that in a few years, the sale of old handsets would account for one-fifth of total U.S. handset sales. Last year, the ReCellular resold or recycled 5.2 million handsets, and 5 years ago the figure was only 2.1 million.　　The company sold 60% of its refurbished handsets to American consumers and sold most of its remaining handsets to dealers in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe. Not long ago, the private company's recycling of handsets was limited to bulk purchases, from charities that held the bazaar, mobile phone retailers, and other businesses with returns.　　Today, ReCellular has started advertising on cable television, claiming that it will buy mobile phones from individuals via the Usell.com website, one at a time. In 2011, according to ReCellular, the company's revenues will grow by more than 50% per cent on the basis of $66 million trillion in 2010.　　Over the past two years, it has raised 20 million of billions of dollars from private equity firms. Andy Caston, an analyst with market research firm Yankee, estimates that the total global sales of old handsets are hundreds of millions of units a year.　　He added that the total global sales of new handsets reached 1.6 billion last year. Some old cell phone dealers have been around for more than 10 years, but the industry has only begun to expand now, because today's state-of-the-art smartphones are expensive and can be sold at $ hundreds of trillion, even if they have been in use for more than a year. At the same time, the weak economy is encouraging people to be frugal.　　Another reason is that some people start looking for a minimalist phone that was produced years ago to avoid the hassle of learning new uses. Remont Lamas, an analyst at the Market Research Institute's International Data company, said the market outlook for old handsets was very good.　　For now, he reckons, old handsets account for less than 5% per cent of total U.S. handset sales. Today, mobile phone manufacturers, wireless network operators, big retailers, including Best Buy, and countless business sites are selling refurbished handsets, as well as using cash or shopping vouchers to buy discarded handsets. Not long ago, some businesses had started advertising on television and radio, in an attempt to persuade more people to sell their old electronic equipment.　　They not only buy mobile phones, but also buy games consoles and MP3 things like that. According to the purchase price of a company like ReCellular, the basic mobile phone used in several years can only sell a few dollars, the most advanced Apple iphone can sell to about 400 dollars. These companies typically resell refurbished handsets in the United States, or sell them abroad through retailers and Web sites. Other refurbished phones will become "replacement phones", which is used to honor warranty or insurance commitments. ReCellular, a 57000-square-foot factory in Dexter, Michigan, handles thousands of old handsets every day.　　Some three-fourths of the old phones can be refurbished, and the rest, such as car phones produced before 20, are too old to be sent to nearby recycling plants to refine metals and plastics, and to recoup a fraction of the cost. Sales of refurbished handsets may affect the market for new handsets, but handset makers also have a way to counter them.　　For example, frequent upgrades to mobile phone software have set up a barrier for marketers who sell refurbished handsets, making it difficult to decode their phones, which makes it hard to transform them into models that apply to foreign networks. Refurbished mobile phone businesses claim that consumers will soon be accustomed to buying and selling such goods. PaceButler of Oklahoma Edmund, a refurbished mobile phone dealer, said the company's president, Chow Flonco, is nothing to be surprised about as a second-hand car. He himself used a refurbished Samsung flip phone, with a retail price of around 30 dollars.