Salvage to me always brings images from the Jim Croce hit "Leroy Brown ...meaner than a junkyard dog". So, when I sat next to Jim Reilly on a flight recently and he said he was in the salvage business the conversation almost ended. Then he told me he ran a B2B site. And I figured it was near death like most marketplaces. But when he told me they held the record for the largest single biggest auctioned on-line item (over $ 25 m for 4 turbines) - bigger then anything ebay has ever sold, I started to show some more interest.
Jim is COO of a Houston based company called SalvageSale. They work with insurance companies, risk and asset managers. He has been spending considerable time in Florida recently with hurricane affected asset business owners.
2 stories he told were fascinating. One was about frozen shrimp which was rejected by a large retail chain because the batch had gone over its stringent temperature specifications. But only marginally so. In the past, the supplier would have sold it to a local salvage shop for may be 5% of sale price. But with the reach of an electronic marketplace - both in thousands of potential buyers around the world and "re-furbish" service providers - the merchandise was checked and certified free of e coli and other flaws, re-packaged and sold for almost 40c on the dollar.
The other was around an expensive server damaged in transit. Instead of going through the reverse logistics of sending it back to manufacturer, local "re-furbishers" re-certified the box and re-packaged it. While the original warranty was void, the asset sold for a lot more than it would have - not to mention the reverse shipping and insurance costs were avoided. Again recovery was many times what it would have been a few years ago.
His site is filled with other case studies similar to this. What he was describing was the emergence of a "good enough" marketplace - where bargain hunters, but not real bottom fishers, can now get access to less than perfect assets. His site has stringent rules on deposits in to escrow accounts and dispute resolution - controls to satisfy wiring $ 25 million to someone you only know from the Internet.
The quality of the assets and the trust factor are bringing more professional buyers and sellers in to the salvage market. Leroy Brown would not begin to understand the word "dis-intermediation" - but he has to behave and pay a fairer price to win in this marketplace.
