Reaping The Rewards Of Turning Laptops On Again
Wisetek founder Sean Sheehan tells Gerry Byrne how recycling computer equipment and securely shredding digital data has led to a global expansion of the Cork company
When a businessman says his laptop is seven years old, he’s probably moaning and hoping somebody will order him a new machine. When Sean Sheehan, the founder and chief executive of Cork IT company Wisetek, says the same thing (which he does), he is boasting.
You imagine that someone who is responsible for selling many thousands of laptops annually would be keeping abreast of the latest technology. However, Sheehan’s laptop stock is different because few are younger than three years old.
The Cork entrepreneur is a central player in the booming worldwide market for refurbished second-hand laptops, to the extent that some computer stores, like one near me, sell nothing else.
The inspiration for Wisetek came from Sheehan’s experience at data storage giant EMC, where he was responsible for taking back leased equipment as contracts expired. The function was always regarded as a corporate inconvenience, he recalls, and Sheehan realised it had the potential to be a lucrative nuisance.
In 2007, after 16 years with the firm, Sheehan quit EMC’s Irish subsidiary, and the following year he established Wisetek with the idea of doing his former job more profitably. EMC agreed a contract giving Wisetek responsibility for retrieving and recycling equipment coming off lease.
The arrangement with EMC, then the world’s largest manufacturer of data storage equipment, proved an invaluable early calling card, which
soon leveraged Wisetek’s growth and global reach beyond its County Cork origins.
It wasn’t long before Sheehan opened a facility in a Thailand freeport to handle used computer equipment flowing in from Asian lessors and outfits such as banks and other large firms renewing staff computers. In addition to Thailand, Wisetek has offices in the Middle East and China.
“We were lucky that we started off with a blue chip like EMC,” says Sheehan. “For the first couple of years we had to watch our finances, but we were providing a service and we got paid for the service. We never really had much bank debt until the last couple of years. From a financial point of view we are in very good shape.”
The phrase ‘the stars were aligned’ could have been coined with Sheehan in mind, as macro developments have repeatedly triggered significant growth opportunities at Wisetek.
In Europe, for example, various iterations of the EU’s WEEE directive proved to be godsends. WEEE forbids the dumping of electronic waste in landfills, while also compelling manufacturers to accept more responsibility for disposal of their IT products.
More stars aligned in 2016 when EMC merged with Dell, enabling Wisetek to forge close links with yet another of the world’s largest computer manufacturers.
Wisetek performs three functions for clients. It grades the quality of returned equipment and decides what can be kept and reused, and what should be scrapped. It refurbishes the good stuff and markets it, sharing the income with the client who provided the equipment for recycling.
Wisetek also erases the data on hard drives and SSD drives to ensure that commercially sensitive information does not reach the outside world. It also scraps the junk, and if a computer is being scrapped the drive is usually mechanically shredded.
To date Wisetek has either erased