ControlZ Changing The Pre-owned Smartphone Market In India

From working as a seller on prominent e-commerce company to acquiring an Indian marketplace for overstock, unboxed, reconditioned, and pre-owned merchandise Overcart, ControlZ—a marketplace for renewed smart phones has come a long way in the Indian market.

Speaking to Opportunity India, Yug Bhatia, founder and CEO, ControlZ said, “I had an opportunity to work as a seller with Amazon and Flipkart which was the only marketplace for the refurbished mobile phones in India. While working in this sector I came across various general industry problems and the way the industry was moving, I was sure that it will not turn out very well.”

He said that no one was solving the problem of facilitating the transfer of an old pre-owned device to a new consumer. “Refurbished industry is based on the service industry so all the components are there in the service industry, will be used in refurbished industry.”

Elaborating further he said that service infrastructure is very good in America and Europe but India there were many different brands and if we talk about Stock Keeping Unit (SKUs) the total SKUs will be thousand and hence, you can’t control the components of thousand SKUs.

“The electronic product is not all about making a product for sale but after sale is very important so service is a very big factor. After seeing all these problems in the industry, we thought we could do something better and we started it having the consumer at the centre point and building it backwards. We thought we will make a device which will look exactly like new,” Yug told Opportunity India.

Yug claims that ControlZ is the only company in the world that can come up with product which looks exactly like new.

Speaking about renewing other electronic devices, Yug suggested that renewed smart phone is the big industry and we will do something in this before moving forward.

“The Indian smart phone industry is roughly USD 40 billion. If I look at the pre-owned market in India, it is one digit billion and organised refurbished market is in millions. The headroom is so big that if you make a good product and excite a consumer enough you could make 100x or 1000x sale so this is the biggest industry and we need go something good here before we will do anything else,” Yug said.

Talking about the challenges while starting this company, Yug mentioned that when we start something different, it is very difficult to convince other people not only investors but getting a team onboard. “Every situation is egg chicken situation. There were lot of challenges like getting the team, getting the supply chain ready.”

The ControlZ is connected to all the tier 1 tier 2 buy back market where it focuses on the devices which can be renewed and then the company selects the devices based on the market standardisation.

“Though we have been working in this industry for the last three years, the ControlZ is just two months old brand. Before that we were working as seller on the other e-commerce market. From the website we have sold 25 products and our last year revenue was 14 crore and this year we want to make it 50 crore,” Yug said.

Recently the company has acquired the Overcart-- an Indian marketplace for overstock, unboxed, reconditioned, and pre-owned merchandise. The acquisition was aligned with ControlZ’s growth strategy to set a new benchmark in the renewed smart phone market in India.

Speaking about the acquisition he divulged, “The Overcart is the pioneer of this industry. The core of the company is software and our core is renewing the devices so over the years they have developed many software to check the quality and standards. After buying this company we are able to use the technology of the company and getting knowledge how the renewing and buyback works.”