PC Dreams - myhalo

 

Vision: A Zero e-Waste World

Mission: To Build a community that embraces a zero e-waste lifestyle. We start by offering our community a seamless experience when it comes to extending the utility life span of their devices.

 

Our Philosophy: We price with our conscience. We buy, sell and trade at prices we find acceptable if we are the customer.

 

Our Rationale,

As a company, we are a part of a bigger movement. A movement where people from all walks of life can easily extend the lifespan of their devices, doing justice to the carbon footprint incurred by its production. All of our business functions are geared towards extending a device’s utility lifespan. We are creating a zero e-waste, environmentally conscious community locally and in the Asia regions.

 

To build a Community, We need a Purpose.

Our community is a subset of a larger community of the socially conscious.

Our community cares about the environment and is committed to reducing their personal carbon footprint. With myhalo, they are essential to moving the world Towards a Zero e-Waste World.

 

Our Commitment to Governance

One of the keystones of sustainability is accountability. We achieve this via our relentless pursuit of every higher quality of Governance. Thus the importance of our system, trade-in methodology, and Automation Quotation systems.

To build a community, we have to establish trust through governance. We have set the benchmark for evaluation and price determination of preowned devices through our platform and technology, and eventually set the standards of upcycling and measuring the carbon footprint re-purposing ICT devices. This will contribute to the green economy of Singapore, through complementing the e-waste recycling initiatives in Singapore’s green plan 2030.

 

Our Collaborative Strategies

As community leaders, we own traffic as we build it. We also share it with the right partners to grow each other’s communities. When networks and communities are shared, both will grow if they are aligned to the shared Purpose.
We worked with sustainability partners, such as Speco (speco.sg), who provides us their solutions to coat our preowned devices. We also work with ChopValue (https://chopvalue.com.sg/) to come up with customized accessories to be used with ICT devices. Such co-branding collaborations will allow both parties to gain multiple exposure with each of our PR activities.
In addition, we will also work with other e-waste related projects such as repair kopitiam (by sustainability labs). Please do read our strategy deck for more details.

 

How we embrace a zero e-waste lifestyle

 

The average Singaporean owns 3.3 digital devices at any given time.

But how many are in active use?

Devices that aren't actively used despite having active demand are e-wastage.

For each device that are traded-in with myhalo, we give them a new lease on life and making it accessible to someone who needs it more.

 

We always think of different ways to extend the lifespan of each and every device.

We optimize each aspect of the devices under our charge, from usage to parts and components, we optimize it completely. We put them back into the circular economy for donation or sell them to someone who needs it!

 

We are always exploring different ways to encourage users to declutter their e-clutter.

By providing convenient places (online/offline/partners) for consumers to drop off their items, accessible DEVICE migration services, and low cost rental programs, we will be able to effectively educate our community on adopting a zero e-waste lifestyle.

 

Our Business Model
Our Business model is a Sustainability tech platform built to allow inclusive, transparent and consistent evaluation and pricing of pre-owned ICT devices, such that we can build trust in the zero e-waste community that we are nurturing. Through educating our community on how to embrace a zero e-waste lifestyle through “Decluttering their e-Clutter”, we will encourage our community to always think first of clearing their e-clutter and returning the devices back into the circular economy, before they make their new purchases.

Thus we build our platform, myhalo, with omni-channel touchpoints to allow consumers to be rewarded for their upcycling efforts conveniently, safely and responsibly. The reward value will be priced competitively as our web crawlers scour through the internet market leaders such as Carousell, Qoo10, Telcos to get the latest price trends. One of the key differentiators of our technology and platform is that our inclusive technology that allows the automated quotation of faulty or partially working units.


Currently, our platforms have 3 quotation modes to satisfy the different channels in the market, namely, the online channel (partnering with shopee, Lazada & Challenger), instore channel and the Remote self-assisted Channel.

All in all, our quotation system now has 192 flows to cater across different ICT devices such as Mobiles, Tablets, Laptops, PCs, Monitors, Gaming consoles and Bluetooth earbuds. The system now outputs around 150,000 outcomes.
We built our system to be inclusive, i.e the quotation system works to include faulty devices and also customers across a huge age group of 18-70 years old.

We also explore technology to lower the cost of data migration and data recovery so that it is easy for customers to change their devices. We will influence consumer behaviour such that eventually they switch from ownership to usership.
Usership reduces the inactive usage time of the device, which is consistent with our aim to extend device usage lifecycle, such that the carbon footprint of devices can be shared across multiple user lifecycles.

Devices that are hand over to us goes through an ISO 27001 data erasure process and will go to these 3 downstreams:
1) Upcycling - where we refurbish our devices, coat them with sustainable cleaning solutions such as Speco and we sell these devices for profits
2) Donation - where we mix and match faulty, partially working units together to make good out of trash. For example, in Comex show 2022, out of 146 units, we made 60 units, which translates to 41% recovery rate. These devices would have been recycled without our intervention.
3) Recycle - where the leftover non-useful components will be sent to our R2 certified recycling partners to be recycled.

Our market is still a relatively untapped one. Surveys show that Singaporeans own an average of 3.3 devices and around 53% are not in active usage.
If we only consider the working population of around 2million+ for ages 18-55, we will have 1.75 x 2M = 3.5M devices to work on. Thus our focus now is on how we can reach out to these audiences. The more we can reach out, the more impact we can create, and the more we can lighten the carbon footprint.
In addition, this is a continuous and ever growing market. The chase for productivity will increase as the world advances. New ICT devices to enable better productivity are designed and churn out into the market daily.
With each iteration of ICT devices, it creates a new wave of pre-owned devices that requires responsible, safe and convenient handling. Our business is to maximize the devices that are returned back into the circular economy, minimize the dropout rate, and extend the lifespan of the devices so that they stay in active usage for as long as possible.

Our revenue growth will be horizontal, where we increase the number of categories of items to upcycling by working with more brand and retail partners; vertically, where we increase the active usage lifespan of each device.

Currently, we work with brand partners such as Samsung, Microsoft, Apple, Dell, where we enable their trade in capabilities using our technology while preserving their brand value. Devices received, approximately 80% are upcycle for profits, 15% are donated to charity and 5% are eventually recycled. The upcycled units are sold through our e-commerce website, laptopfactoryoutlet.com.sg, lazada, Shopee, which accounts to 30% of our sales locally. 70% of the inventory is exported to overseas developing countries, where we maximize our profits through precise matching of the pre-owned device condition expectations of different countries.

Coming Q4 2022, we will be launching our new remote assisted quotation flow. Consumers can now get a remote quotation simply through answering a few questions online and our customer service will be in touch with them immediately through whatsapp to approved on the final trade in value of their devices. Customers will just need to show the approved value to any of our appointed retail partners, where they get to enjoy different trade in promotions (Final Trade in Value + Promotion Trade in Value funded by retailers), depending on their choice of purchases and retailers.

Our target audience are the younger generation, who enjoy innovative consumer journeys, and habitually obtain their best deals through their fingertips (mobile users getting information through apps or online).
Once they come onboard, we will nurture them slowly, showing them the culture of embracing zero e-waste lifestyle, build trust through governance and eventually get them to pledge to our movement to be our zero e-waste advocate.

Our Impact

Our business direction is in the gap which is relatively untouched in the Singapore Green Plan 2030. In Green Plan 2030, e-waste is measured through tonnage, and thus Singapore’s direction is to focus on handling heavy mass e-waste such as fridge, ovens and washing machines. Smaller ICT devices make up less than 3% of the total e-waste tonnage in Singapore.
However, studies have shown that the optimal usage of washing machines to limit Global warming potential (GWP) is to use them for 24 years. For mobile phones the optimal usage is a staggering 232 years. ICT e-waste is also the fastest growing waste, mainly due to its light weight and small volume attributes. People tend to leave them in their drawers and forget about it.
However, their GWP is way higher than other heavier e-waste. Thus, there is a dire need to put a governance system around this problem.

We will have 3 carbon impact numbers which are calculated below:
1) How much Carbon we have Lightened -> Calculated according the the number of different categories of devices we have collected
2) Recovery rate from recycled devices
3) A Carbon Footprint Repurposing Index (Currently working to finalize this calculation).

Through our proprietary integrated platform, we have started a zero e-waste movement in Singapore. We want to reduce e-waste through education and collaboration with government, education institutions, information & communication technology industry, tech community, partners, retailers and enterprises.
We are launching a “Take Action” campaign as part of our zero e-waste movement.
What counts as an action:

1. Joining the zero e-waste community

2. Every myhalo Pledge taken

3. Liking a myhalo post

4. Sharing a myhalo post

5. Every device traded in

6. Every device repaired

7. Every refurbished device purchased

This campaign that we are embarking on, demonstrates our effort towards zero e-waste education and offers a tangible measure of the impact we are making towards a zero e-waste future. To us, each action that enables zero e-waste education, or helps extend the lifespan of a device is one step towards a more sustainable future for all.
Our target is to reach a 200k action within our 1st year launch.

 

Our Future

To improve our profitability and exposure, we are also in talks with Fintech to launch a trade forward program where we want customers to start engaging with us on their first ownership lifecycle. Details will not be shared as NDA is signed for the program. Ultimately if this goes through, we will be able get our sustainability message out to all customers on the platforms and apps of the Fintech partner companies.

We are also working with partners such as Challenger to include our process and systems into their valueclub membership apps where we will be driving joint sustainability messages on their 1 million strong members.

We also have a few trademarks of our programs and brand in progress, as part of our preparation to bring our brand and business model overseas. We aim to expand into the SEA region in the next 5 years.


Our CSR
As mentioned above, we run a CSR program bridgethedigitaldivide.sg, initiated by our partner, Xpointo, a marketing company.
Currently we have 8 beneficiaries with us, and we have donated around 1200 over devices over the last 2 years.
Our target group of beneficiaries are underprivileged women, kids and migrant workers.

We are also in the midst or starting a zero e-waste community and start on our education to share with them what is a zero e-waste lifestyle.