Chuck Harris wrote:

I'm not trying to be difficult Michael. The reason I have trouble
seeing how this is a money making venture is the low price of
cell phones and pagers. When a Cell phone lists for $99, how much
time can a technician really spend fixing it?

In the repair business, the maximum repair price you can charge a
customer has to be less than 40% of the cost of new, or they will
always walk away. If they walk away, and give you their phones for
free, then perhaps you could make a little bit fixing it and selling
it, but really, now, tracphone sells refurbished nokia 5185i's for
$39. There is not much margine in that.

Who pays for the time necessary for the technician to open the phone,
diagnose the problem, unsolder the offending module, test the phone,
reassemble, and pack? You would have to pay your technicians less
than $10 per hour!

-Chuck


It is run like a factory, not one up repairs. That makes a huge
difference. The techs don't disassemble the units. the production people
do a quick test, clean up the cases, and send the boards to be repaired.
A lot of repairs are new crystals, or reprogramming the synthesizer, or
replacing a bad LCD display which is done before a tech sees it.

Also, they do large runs of the same unit, then do a different model.
Also, some only need a few pieces of the case replaced, and the password
cracked so it can be reprogrammed in the field.

They have service contracts where someone ships a 1000 pagers or 100
cell phones and they repair what they can in a fixed time. They either
return the bad units, or replace them with their own stock of repaired
units, depending on the contract. they also repair a lot of older models
and sell them overseas.
--


Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida