Envela Corporation, which owns a number of ITAD and e-scrap recycling operations, reported lower sales of secondhand hard drives in the first quarter of the year but higher demand for consumer technology devices.
Irving, Texas-headquartered Envela is a publicly traded company whose commercial segment includes the electronics recovery firms Echo Environmental, ITAD USA, Teladvance, CEX and Avail. Envela this month reported its quarterly earnings for the three months ended March 31. The company’s commercial segment reported $11.6 million in sales, down 11.2% from the same period in 2023.
“The change was primarily attributed to lower revenue from softened demand for reuse hard drives, but was offset by stronger sales from the resale of personal technology assets,” the company said in a statement. “We had a strong supply of personal technology assets from our retail trade in partners who destocked in late Fiscal 2023.”
Envela reported $1.5 million in commercial inventories, which “primarily includes processed and unprocessed, base metals, electronic scrap materials containing precious metals as well as technology assets being held for resale,” the company explained in its financial filing. Those inventories were up 20% year over year.
In announcing the results, the company noted that despite the lower year-over-year commercial quarterly results, “revenues have been trending upwards over the prior three quarters, reflecting Envela’s growing partnerships with leading technology and electronics companies, as well as a range of local businesses.”
Envela previously reported how much of its revenue came from reuse and how much came from recycling, but the company no longer does that. The latest financial filing gives an explanation that Envela now has more “diverse revenue and gross margin streams associated with service offerings and as such to continue reporting under the prior disclosure methodology would be less representative of how the business operates.”
The company’s consumer division includes retail sales of jewelry and other luxury items.