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Jaipur’s serial entrepreneur enters 2nd hand smartphone market

Tags: goel phone market
JAIPUR: After selling two of his startups in an entrepreneurial journey he started in 2009 along with his friends in the LNMIIT days, Prateek Goel has now ventured into Rs 28,000 crore second hand or used smartphone market with an app InstaCash to take on e-commerce biggies like Flipkart, Amazon, OLX and Quikr.

While various reports by Gartner and Deloitte have projected that the used smartphone market will touch around Rs 60,000 crore by 2021, the organized market commands only 8% share. As per the reports, around seven crore smartphones will be discarded by users in 2017 who would upgrade to new models and the second-hand market, growing at 35% year-on-year, will reach a size of 13 crore phones by 2021.

Goel, who prefers to base his R&D operations in Jaipur even though InstaCash is headquartered in Gurgaon, has already rolled out its operations in Delhi and NCR region and buys about 2500 phones a month with a 70% month-on-month growth. But he said they would introduce the product officially in Jaipur.

“While leading e-commerce giants are present in the market through their exchange programmes, the seller never has an opportunity to value the price of his/her phone in an objective and transparent manner. That’s where InstaCash fills a huge gap. Secondly, the price InstaCash offers is about 1.3 times higher than what the online platforms give,” said Goel, founder of the startup.

Explaining about the app, Goel said InstaCash is a technological break-through for used smartphones like Droom in the second-hand car segment which uses a scientific diagnostic system to discover the price of a phone. “You just need to run the app on your phone and in 60 seconds, you get the value of your phone,” he said.

Delhi-based Cashify is the only other player to provide such a price discovery mechanism in the country where the smartphone penetration is about 37% out of an user base of approximately 100 crore. However, with internet becoming cheaper, focus on digital currency, and the urge of the people to upgrade to new versions are expected to galvanize the second-hand market.

“Smartphones penetration is rapidly rising not only because internet has become cheaper but also they provide host of useful functionalities. That’s why the feature phone users will buy either low-cost smartphones from companies like Jio or Airtel, or they would go for secondhand market,” added Goel.

InstaCash is also planning to partner with organized retail players like Reliance Digital, Go Mobile, Spice Hotspot, Sangeetha Mobiles, Vijay Sales, Sargam India Electronics, The Mobile Store and is already in talks with some of them to increase its footprint in 400 stores in the country. While InstaCash has not raised any money so far, Goel said they are looking to raise at least Rs 3-6 crore to expand the operations.

“We don’t need money to scale up gradually as we already have advance money deposited with us by the vendors who buy these phones and sell them after refurbishing. But for aggressive expansion, we need funds,” added Goel.

A serial entrepreneur, Goel, along with other promoters, had sold their previous venture Teramatrix to Sillicon Valley‘s Internet of Things (IoT) startup Globetouch in March this year. Their first venture Codescape was acquired by Shyam group in 2011.

Source : timesofindia



This post first appeared on Daily Kiran, please read the originial post: here

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