Interview with Dimitri Nauwelaerts, Asia Data Destruction Regional Commercial Manager


EuroCham: How long have you been in Cambodia and how are you enjoying it? What’s your favorite escape from the city?

Dimitri: I’ve been here for three and a half years, so it was just before COVID that I arrived to join my girlfriend here. It was a special time, things were okay before the breakout, but I was in a difficult situation because I didn’t have a job at first. Now that I’ve been working in the country for a while, I’m really starting to enjoy it. Since it’s opened up, there’s more tourists and events, just more to do.

So I really feel that maybe for a year now, I'm starting to get to learn more about the country and it feels more like home. country and kind of make my plate.

My favorite quick getaway would have to be Silk Island, it’s very close by and I head there with my bike. There’s a nice guesthouse, I can relax by the pool and make it back to the city on my bike. It’s great for the exercise, I can eat well there, and it’s a nice respite from the noisy city.

You’ve worked in several sectors since arriving, with each of your jobs related to sales. What’s your secret to being a successful salesman in different contexts?

Dimitri: I never envisioned myself as a salesman, but I did go to business school, and there's different ways you can go from there. I do like the marketing side of things and from there stumbled into sales positions quite a lot. It really helps you to understand very directly who is your customer and how to approach them. It’s a valuable learning process.  

And, of course, I worked in different industries, so it gives you a lot of different perspectives on who the different types of custmers I learned a lot, especially when I was a salesman for a secondhand car company in Belgium, which offered both B2B and B2C sales.

You have to change your sales pitch depending on who is in front of you. If there's a family coming in with children, you need to mention different things than when there's a professional coming in who knows all about the car, so really identifying a customer and adapting to him/her is key .

You can really apply it to any industry. Part of it is creating a need that wasn’t there before. Maybe you don’t need a new watch but I can tell you all about this new model that just came out and now you’re thinking about it. It’s sort of the same at ADD. Some IT managers may think that they can erase data just by formatting a hard drive, but that’s not true.

I’m not technician but I can retrieve the data on a formatted hard drive in five minutes. It’s very easy. When I visit them, they might think that they don’t need a specific data erasure software, but when I inform them about the risks, they understand that they need it.

EuroCham: Can you tell us more about Asia Data Destruction?

Dimitri: Sure, the company is based in Thailand and has been around for 15 years. Initially, it was more like a recycling company. They were recycling batteries and saw an opportunity in switching to IT equipment, which could be refurbished, dismantled, or recycled.

So they got involved with recycling partners from the region in China, Thailand, and Vietnam, and that's how it got the ball rolling. Then it was refurbishing, repairing It devices and reselling second hand IT equipment in Thailand

This new concept emerged called ITAD, which means IT asset disposition and that's basically our main mission now. We go to companies, and we provide solutions for their decommissioned stock.

Most IT companies change their equipment every four to five years, but most of these IT assets can still work for another 4-5 years We can provide solutions for this and buy back some of the stock, which if it’s in good condition, can be refurbished and sold on the secondhand market.

Many companies throw them away or stockpile them somewhere in the basement, and then the value gets lost. So that's what ITAD companies try to change. They try to retrieve the value from old IT equipment, extend their lifecycle and streamline this process for a more efficient circular economy.

And the second service we provide is quite important nowadays, which is protecting company data. When you throw away IT equipment, a lot of data is still stored on that. And so we say, okay, we can erase this data for you, so you don't have to stress about data getting leaked when you dispose of your IT stock.

So those are the main two components we do. There's a whole process behind what we do with the discarded stock. We can hopefully refurbish and resell, and then if not, we recycle.

We hope that soon the Data Protection Law will be passed, which will create a big change in the industry. A data protection law was passed last month in Vietnam, and last year Thailand also passed a data protection law. We’re seeing that the region is picking up and understanding the need for real clear regulation around data protection and we hope that Cambodia will follow soon.

What’s the problem with getting rid of data the old fashioned way, by dragging it to the recycle bin?

The concept of data erasure is quite simple. So every hard drive has zeros and ones, and if you format it, the data is still there, it’s just unstructured now. You just remove the path to it. What you need to do is overwrite the whole hard drive with random data, and that’s what our software does.

This is important for companies and individuals alike. If you buy or sell a secondhand computer, there may be a simple way to access that data even though its previous user deleted it. Companies are often more valuable targets for hackers, and during COVID hospitals were commonly attacked by hackers, as they are constantly storing and moving sensitive personal data.

Now, we work mainly with financial institutions. They are already obliged to have some kind of data protection in place because of the National Bank of Cambodia. So they need to be compliant with their guidelines. International companies also need to be compliant with the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).

The GDPR is a set of European Union regulations covering data protection, established in 2016, and they changed the whole game. These regulations are why you have to accept cookies on websites and consent is required to share user data. This was a big step in ensuring data protection for users.

What’s the most satisfying part of your job?

We’re working on two subjects that are very important right now. One is cybersecurity, and that’s getting more important each day. And the other one is sustainability and promoting a circular economy.

I feel we need to play a part in this push for a more circular economy because as it stands, the IT industry is very polluting. It certainly values consumption over recycling and we’d like to play a small part in fixing this problem in Cambodia.

Manufacturers are also responsible, because they often create phones that break very easily, and are difficult to repair. There’s not an ecosystem where you can exchange or refurbish IT equipment, and this needs to change. This needs to be regulated as well, because I don’t think manufacturers will do this by themselves.

You can recycle 98% of your phone. Many components are recyclable in IT equipment. The cost to not recycle is very high for the environment, and at the same time you can get value back from IT waste. So there's a missed opportunity here.

When a consumer buys an IT product, they're, putting the cost on society for the future because there is no system in place to prevent the products from becoming waste. Manufacturers can keep producing with no ramifications, sustaining the linear model of production

If you look at the secondhand IT market here too, a lot of IT products are imported from overseas .So there’s a lack of quality control on equipment that’s coming in, which rapidly becomes waste, without a proper infrastructure to manage it.

We hope to changes some of this. food is labeled with a nutrient score to let you know how healthy it is. This could be adapted to electronics. How recyclable is the product you’re buying? Apple for example, makes their phones notoriously hard to repair.

Right now, we work with Ecobatt to recycle e-waste, so please come in and drop off your e-waste if you have it and keep this waste out of the landfill.The idea is to dismantle and recycle, hopefully locally. Hopefully soon, more investors will see this opportunity.

There is a recycling industry here, it’s just not formal, it’s people working in the streets. They are the first recyclers of Cambodia but it’s unregulated and dangerous work. Investing and formalising in collection, sorting and separating would be the next step, because it is so difficult to recycle when everything is mixed.

 


 


 

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