The mobile Roadhound

you can chew – to take on what you can handle rather than take on a lot and do an average job,” says Sharma.

Mobile losses

Despite seeing losses due to the mobile phones becoming mass merchant consumables, Sharma never went out to become a distributor of every brand.
He carefully sort out the brands he wanted and took on brands one at a time. After a fair period of time a good job of distribution is what value you can add to the product and brand, he believes, and for Sharma this still true rings true to this day.

Attractive phones

Sharma in his time has seen it all in distribution. For him, there has been a lot of consolidation in distribution. His biggest competitor, Tele Pacific, was once owned by Tech Pacific – now Ingram Micro.

“Now they don’t sell mobiles at all. I don’t know if that is by choice or it just happened that way. I think the problem with mobile phone distribution is the operating cost: you have to stay trim and lean because you can’t afford the manpower you would’ve had in the early days.”

With competing distributors fading away, Sharma’s biggest threat these days is the consolidation of smaller retail shops, which are being swallowed up by “the one-chain store operation”.

He believes it is going to become harder to survive because the large phone retail chains have more buying power, although as far as mobile phones are concerned the difference between big and small is a few dollars as margin gets squeezed.

However, from time to time manufacturers need to do deals and the big retailers always walk away with the a chunk of that deal.

“I suppose the thing that really happened was phones have gotten sophisticated. They are now smaller, with more features and moved from monochrome to full-blown colour screens. The talk time is very long.”

When mobole phones first appeared they were huge and you needed “muscles to carry those things around”. The people who initially bought the phones were the business people and trades people (like plumbers, electricians and lawyers); they needed to stay in touch. “Call charges were very expensive and no teenagers could afford to pay the price.”

As phones became more financially and physically attractive, younger people wanted them and telcos started to target their offerings to the very young market, says Sharma.

“Computers raised the advancement and raised people’s expectations about what can happen with technology. Phones were no different and the level of expectation got higher and higher every year.

The time of his life

Despite ongoing problems within the telco industry between Telstra and everyone else, the current climate has been good for Roadhound.

Sharma says around six-and-a-half to seven million brand new phones have been sold in Australia this year and that has been the case for the past two to three years.

“I think what is happening in the mobile phone industry is very different from the Internet boom and bust of the late 1990s.

“Mobile phones are something you can feel, touch and use for contact. Mobile phones give a lot of people freedom to stay in touch and I don’t think there is an equivalent to the product,” he says.

That is why it will be something that will not fade away as people are choosing a mobile and not worrying about the landline.

What next?

Sharma has been plugging away at the business so long that he has not had time to relax.

“I’m thinking about retiring – I’m only thinking about it at this stage. I have able and competent staff. However, I don’t play golf, so I have to find another interest other than work because it has been my life,” he says.

Nevertheless, for the time being he has to deal with the situation that has arisen from Telstra and Brightstar’s distribution agreement, which effectively locks out other mobile phone distributors.

“It has had an impact on the business; it’s not a unique situation. The impact from the decision will affect Roadhound, we just have to do our best to minimise the impact.

“We will probably look at diversifying. In the past we haven’t placed big importance into mobile phone accessories.

“However, in the past 18 months, we made the effort to sell accessory brands from vendors like Platronics,” he says.