On this episode of Built in Africa, we take a look at how Y Combinator-backed Eze Wholesale is altering the global landscape of the used smartphone market. Image credit: Techjaja.com. FULL TRANSCRIPT  Narrator: In 2017, two friends, one a software engineer, and the other, a petroleum engineer, saw an opportunity. They became wholesalers in the used smartphone market currently valued at a whopping $46 billion.  They operated this business for over two years before they eventually realised that the used smartphone market had more issues than they thought. This problem gave birth to an entirely new business. [Theme song] On this episode of Built in Africa, we explore how Y Combinator-backed Eze Wholesale is altering the global landscape of the used smartphone market. David Iya and Joshua Nzewi are childhood friends, and they ran a couple of businesses together up until they got into the university. By 2016, Joshua had become a petroleum engineer at Shell while David had worked as a software engineer with two US-based Internet companies. One day, David called Joshua telling him about a business opportunity he had in mind: Joshua Nzewi: So one day he called me the scan the arbitrage opportunity between buying phones locally and selling them online. And that’s what brought us into that. Narrator: Having run businesses before, it didn’t take long for the two friends to kick this off. They did this for two and a half years but soon began to notice a trend. Joshua Nzewi: For about two and half years where we were just trading devices, buying them from individuals and selling them overseas. Until we went to trading conferences where we realised that there are inefficiencies in the market at a much higher level where companies are moving a billion dollars in devices a month. And realising this was not just a problem in the United States but also abroad as well. So the channels in which people are able to source these devices and then resell them. Narrator: So in January 2020,  they built Eze wholesale to try to solve this problem. Joshua Nzewi: So we created this online marketplace that would enable people to transact a lot faster, with more security and safety, and transparency, and much more efficiently than people are currently trading now. Narrator: Globally, the used smartphone market is valued at $46 billion, and in markets like Nigeria, it has continued to grow in importance. The International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that used smartphone shipments will exceed 330 million units with a market value of $67 billion by 2023. Here’s how this process works.  Ben lives in the UK and uses an iPhone X. But, he’s tired of it, so he walks into a carrier store and drops it off. The carrier store then auctions the iPhone X and other phones that have been dropped off to wholesalers. The wholesalers are tasked with the responsibility of effective distribution to those who need them. And this is why weeks later, Tobi buys that iPhone X in Nigeria for much less than its original cost. As a B2B platform, Eze Wholesale allows traders to place, buy, and sell used smartphones. Sellers can post the devices they have in stock, and then buyers can buy directly from them via the platform. For Eze wholesale, the aim is to open up the market for all and eliminate the middlemen in this space. Joshua Nzewi: What we’re trying to do in this space is open the market up, so that anyone can tr...