Times are tough for independent mobile retailers, not just competing with other businesses in the sector like JB HiFi, Officeworks and the like, but also the carriers and their own-branded stores as well. Today, one of the mid sized independent retailers has called it a day, with Allphones collapsing into voluntary administration.
Canadian-owned AMT Group operates the Allphones business in Australia, which has 84 stores nation-wide with 25 of these owned by Allphones themselves. The rest are owned by either franchisees or licensed and run on behalf of other parties. 18 of the 25 stores owned by Allphones closed today unfortunately, causing the immediate loss of 69 jobs. Staff were informed of the closures this morning.
Administrators, PPB Advisory, have said that the company’s owners could no longer continue to fund the losses of the group. Their priority is to ensure that the stores left open are able to continue to trade on a business as usual basis, at least for now. Their spokesperson, Phil Carter, said that:
We are today undertaking an urgent review of Allphones’ business in order to stabilise the current operations and store network, and ensure that the employees impacted by the store closures today are fully supported.
As usual in a situation like this, discussions are under way to find someone to take over the operation of the remainder of the store network.
Allphones parent company AMT Group runs (or at least ran) the Samsung Experience Stores in Sydney and Melbourne, but at this stage, there’s no indication that those stores are affected by today’s developments.
For now it is business as usual for the remaining stores, so for those interested Allphones will have the Huawei Mate 9 available from Tuesday.
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I bought my first android phone from allphones. shame to see them go
Their outright prices are totally out of touch no wonder they went down, besides boring shop front with wooden stock to touch and limited range well at least they’re foreign owned so it’s fine
I remember them back from the day when they used to sell Optus, Voda and 3 devices and also outright devices, sometimes at competitive prices…I bought a Nokia E63 from them in 2008 IIRC…
When I was a Windows Phone user I got my Lumia 900 from them.