Radio Shack & 4 others join forces to buy phones

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RadioShack joins forces with other phone sellers

Four large mobile phone resellers said on Monday that they would team up to create a purchasing alliance that resells more than 50 million phones every year, as many as the world's biggest telecoms operators.

U.S. electronics retailer RadioShack, Danish wholesaler and supply chain manager Dangaard, U.S. phone reseller Brightstar and Dubai-based Axiom together have access to 70,000 points of sale in 52 countries.

The alliance will be called Braxda Telecom.

"We can now go to Nokia, Motorola and Samsung and offer them to launch one product across the world in one introduction, through only one point of contact," said Michael Koehn, chief operating officer of Dangaard.

Such global launches are important as each of the top five vendors launches almost one new model every week.

By joining forces, the four companies, which remain independent, will exceed the purchasing power of the biggest international telecommunications operators bar Vodafone of Britain, Koehn said.

All mobile phone vendors together sold 816 million handsets last year, with the top five selling over 75 percent of those. Nokia alone produced one-third of the total.

Analysts said the alliance gives its partners a better place at the negotiating table with mobile phone vendors.

"They will get better prices because of bigger volumes," said John Strand, a mobile telecoms consultant in Copenhagen.

"The operators are joining forces, the big handset vendors are getting bigger, and so now you see the wholesalers coming together," he added, referring to the most recent takeover of BellSouth by AT&T announced on Sunday.

The collaboration also helps the companies to learn from retail experiences in other regions, and they can shift inventory easier between those regions.

Dangaard knows how to pre-configure handsets so that the phone-- even the most sophisticated smartphone--works out of the box when it is sold to a consumer in large retail chains like MediaMarkt or Saturn.

The Danish firm also arranges repair and help line support for these chains.

"You will never be able to do that as an independent retailer," Koehn said.

When a product comes to the end of its commercial life, the vendors will also provide one point of contact to dispose of the final products, without disrupting the overall price structure of the market, he added.