Electronics reseller scouts site for recycling facility

A Texas-based company that specializes in remanufacturing and remarketing computers after it wipes their hard drives clean is scouting the Reno area for locations for a new facility.

Newmarket IT, a privately held company based at Austin, hopes to be open in northern Nevada by late this year.

"This is an urgent project for us. We have business demand right now," said Jeff Zeigler, the company's founder and chairman.

He said Newmarket is working with representatives of the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada to find 50,000 square feet of distribution space, although it also needs the capability to expand to 100,000 square feet fairly quickly.

The company expects to employ 35 when it starts up operations in Reno, Zeigler said, and the company projects that employment will reach 75 or 80 by late next year.

The workers will include top-skilled computer technicians as well as materials handlers, he said.

"The whole Reno area is a fantastic distribution location," he said. "It gets us close to our customers on the West Coast."

Newmarket IT, founded in 1999, recently completed a round of financing that will support development of the facility in northern Nevada along with other expansion.

Catterton Partners, a Connecticut-based private equity firm, committed $50 million in growth capital to Newmarket.

The investment group noted that recycling and reselling personal computers is a $1.5 billion industry that is growing by 45 percent a year.

Along with new facilities in Reno and the Midwest, the capital raised by Newmarket also will help support its move into recycling products such as cell phones and personal digital assistants.

Newmarket provides computer recycling services to more than 16,000 companies in 60 nations.

It removes data from old computers, terminates licensing agreements on software, cleans up the computers and either resells them or disposes of them in ways that meet environmental regulations.

Along with a new 120,000-square-foot facility at Austin, Newmarket operates a processing plant at Richmond, Va.

"Safely and securely sanitizing, recycling, refurbishing and reselling IT equipment is one of the fastest growing segments of the consumer electronics business," said Jake Player, a former Dell executive who was named Newmarket's president last week.