Tiny cameras from deconstructed mobile phones, LED strips and plastic vacuum cleaner handles are all to hand as engineers work on thousands of malfunctioning or outdated items at the UK’s largest electrical goods repair centre, just outside Newark.
The piles of often minuscule parts go into rejuvenating 1.4m appliances a year, from smartphones to fridge freezers. More than 1,000 employees work on identifying problems and fixing them at the Nottinghamshire facility run by electrical goods retailer Currys.
Alex Baldock, the chief executive of Currys, says the aim of the Newark plant, and a linked business that sells refurbished items, is not just to burnish the group’s green credentials by reducing landfill but a core strategy for driving growth while improving profits and customer service.
“If all we did was sell laptops … well, other people do that. But competitors can’t do repairs like we do,” says the sharply dressed Baldock as we walk across the vast shop floor. “There is a fair bit of greenwashing out there, but this is good business for us. Our purpose and profit go hand in hand.”
Baldock has put reviving damaged electronic goods at the heart of his strategy to keep the retailer, which has 727 stores in six countries, relevant as it fights budget online retailers including Amazon for market share.
Founded as Dixons photography studio in Southend, Essex, in 1937, the £900m company has weathered significant change in the retail landscape. Dixons took over Currys Group in 1984, and later ditched the PC World and Dixons brands as it streamlined the business to adapt to changing shopping habits.
After facing down a takeover attempt by a Chinese e-commerce company earlier this year, Baldock has to prove to investors that he can keep growth motoring.
Currys makes more profit from selling a refurbished mobile phone than a new one, so expanding the repair activities is a key focus. The cost of living crisis and shoppers’ environmental concerns have driven demand for secondhand and repaired goods – whether that is clothing or gadgets.
The group already has 12 million repair customers. However, achieving income parity between services and retail will require a big shift: services are currently worth only a few hundred million of the group’s £5bn total UK and Ireland revenue.
“Right to repair” legislation could be helpful. Introduced in the UK in 2021 and making its way through the European parliament, the law requires manufacturers to design certain products with repair in mind and to make parts and specialist tools available.
But could this lead to more people mending their own items at home? Baldock is not concerned: fixing most gadgets requires specialist expertise, he says.
Currys offers customers £5 for every unwanted electrical item brought back, which has resulted in 65,000 trade-ins since the scheme launched in 2022, and provided 120,000 valuable spare parts for the repair service.
Other activities include 3D printing of spare parts, troubleshooting customer problems through video calls and compiling a database of past issues to be used in diagnosing problems.
Chatting to technicians in the vast repair centre, Baldock appears to be in his element.
“I always wanted a proper job,” he says of his first move into retail 12 years ago after stints as a management consultant and a banker.
Taking over as chief executive at Currys in 2018, he was quick to criticise the legacy of his predecessor, Seb James, and slashed thousands of jobs and closed stores in the wake of an ill-judged 2014 merger with Carphone Warehouse.
But Baldock has had to eat a certain amount of humble pie as he faced his own challenges: he cut hundreds of management jobs and sold off Currys’s Greek division. This year, he fought off takeover interest from US activist investor Elliott as well as China’s JD.com, and Mike Ashley’s acquisitive Frasers Group has been hovering on the share register for a year.
The business has, he says, gone through “pestilence, shortages, wars and the cost of living crisis and some well-publicised challenges in our international business” but is now “well set to accelerate progress”.
Aside from services, Currys is expanding its ranges with health and wellness gadgets such as hairdryers and electric toothbrushes; ebikes and escooters; and AI-linked gadgets such as phones that can help improve the user’s photography. It is also expanding services for small businesses.
Baldock says talk of Currys planning to sell its £350m ID Mobile networks business is off the mark, and adds that it is also holding on to its Nordic arm – 421 stores in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland – despite well-publicised troubles as rivals discount heavily.
Baldock appears to love getting things into line. With his clipped accent and closely clipped hair, he could be from an upper-crust military background. His father did join the army as a teenager – but as a way of escaping a tough background in south London. Baldock Sr then became a detergent salesman before working his way up to head Guinness Brewing, then joining the board of Marks & Spencer as a non-executive director.Baldock says his father, Brian, had a “ferocious work ethic” and the house was constantly “full of business people and business talk”. As someone who works six days a week getting up at 5am each day, Baldock admits “maybe I absorbed some of it”.
Baldock’s youth was rather more privileged than his father’s – he attended the private Oundle school in Northamptonshire before going to the University of Oxford, Baldock said he was “not given money but had to earn it” as a youth. He took jobs in bars and construction, and even built the tent for a circus in Australia.
After university, Baldock’s first job was as a management consultant with Kalchas, where he worked on factory efficiency with KP Crisps in Middlesbrough. After a stint at Barclays he moved to Lombard, the asset finance division of RBS, where he became managing director before leaving to head Very, the Barclay brothers’ Liverpool-based home shopping business, for six years.
Baldock insists this varied experience helps him keep his feet on the ground and engage with a wide variety of people in Currys’s 28,000-strong workforce.
“These jobs are a privilege,” he says. “You need to lead by example and with energy and give a lot – or you should get out of the way for somebody who will. There is sweat and grind and effort involved.”
CV
Age 53.
Family Wife Amy and four children – Max, Joe, Harry and Issy.
Education Oundle School, then modern history at Worcester College, Oxford
Pay £2.4m last year, including £1.3m bonus.
Last holiday Puglia in Italy last week.
Biggest regret “Horrible phrase, but a valuable concept: I’ve tried to learn from Jeff Bezos’s ‘regret minimalisation framework’. Be mindful of how you’ll feel later about decisions you make now.”
Best advice he’s been given “Aged 18, I was glumly contemplating doing a law degree. My best teacher of my favourite subject, history, said: ‘Do what you love. You’ll be better at it.’”
Words or phrase he overuses “Raise your gaze”.
How he relaxes “Gym, running, films and theatre, reading history and riding my horse, and following Chelsea, though that’s scarcely relaxing.”