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#1
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Chuck Harris wrote:
I know a guy that repairs pagers, but you cannot convince me that it is a profitable business.... The way he moaned about the cost of my fixing his RF signal generator gives me a clue. -Chuck Believe what you want, but the place has around 100 employees, and was looking at buying the old L3-Com/Microdyne complex to expand into its 120,000+ square feet of buildings and acres of land for parking. They are bigger than Microdyne was when it closed the complex and moved to Pennsylvania. If there is no money in repairing pager and cell phones, why do they want to buy property which is priced at 1.6 million dollars? Here is the listing for the complex: http://www.foxfirerealty.com/showlis...tid=17779&id=2 -- Michael A. Terrell Central Florida |
#2
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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 Michael A. Terrell wrote: Chuck Harris wrote: I know a guy that repairs pagers, but you cannot convince me that it is a profitable business.... The way he moaned about the cost of my fixing his RF signal generator gives me a clue. -Chuck Believe what you want, but the place has around 100 employees, and was looking at buying the old L3-Com/Microdyne complex to expand into its 120,000+ square feet of buildings and acres of land for parking. They are bigger than Microdyne was when it closed the complex and moved to Pennsylvania. If there is no money in repairing pager and cell phones, why do they want to buy property which is priced at 1.6 million dollars? Here is the listing for the complex: http://www.foxfirerealty.com/showlis...tid=17779&id=2 |
#3
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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 |
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