Chinese gadget recycling start-up Huishoubao cannot wait for 5G to come soon enough
- 5G smartphone shipments are expected to reaching 110 million units by 2021, according to a research note from Counterpoint in April
Li Xiaoya has made a business out of the throwaway society with one of China’s biggest online trading platforms for second-hand mobile phones.
Called Huishoubao, which means “recycling treasures” in Chinese, the Shenzhen-based start-up is now betting that the transition from 4G to the superfast 5G telecommunication networks would bring about a new wave of gadget upgrades as consumers go for the shiny new gear.
“The arrival of 5G will push for further upgrade in hardware, and make room for innovations in new applications,” Li, in her 30s and a former product manager at Tencent Holdings before she started Huishoubao, said in an interview in Hong Kong earlier this month. “When big players in the smartphone industry are gearing up for 5G, it naturally becomes a growth engine for supplementary industries like ours.”
Huishoubao raised a Series C round of funding last September from Alibaba, which owns the Post. The start-up did not disclose the funding size or its valuation.
The fortunes of the second-hand trading market are tied closely to first-hand sales. And China’s smartphone makers are undergoing a sluggish phase as consumers postpone their upgrades to wait for new 5G-enabled phones to hit the market. Smartphone shipments for China fell 14 per cent to about 396 million units last year, according to Canalys, an industry research company.