FROM THE INDUSTRY
in Ireland; a lot of the telecommunication products used to fit nicely there. But now, the first pallet that we send over, because of all the red tape, it costs us around about £400, and then the next pallet is £200, whereas it used to be around about £90. Carriage is a big issue. We had distributors in Spain, Italy, France, and they all said, ‘It’s just too difficult to deal with you guys.’ There’s an element too that a lot of the Europeans feel ‘Well, if you don’t want anything to do with us then we don’t want anything to do with you.’ Generally older people, if you ask them, ‘Give me one thing that has been good about Brexit.’ And all they can come up with is, ‘We’re probably going to get pounds and stones back.’ But there isn’t anything else is there. It’s just absolutely a disaster. And you press them on it, and they end up just getting quite aggressive and calling you names and saying, ‘Oh, we won, get over it.’ I mean, I’m speechless. I hope we rejoin. I’m hopeful that’s on the cards in the next 10 years. The impact is, we don’t really bother trying to get any export business because it’s just too difficult. Even with non EU countries? We’ve got an agent in Dubai, a guy down in South Africa, but the vast majority of our customers are European. They’re obviously closer to where we are. I think because our stuff is relatively low cost, and you’ve got to sell a lot of volume, I think there’s bigger fish to fry. I think it’s probably the other way round really.
generation consolidates it, and then the third generation buggers it up.
What a journey. What area are you looking at next? The next stage is coming from smart energy. We’re now big suppliers to the guys that are putting in the electric charging points, the guys that are actually changing all the gas and electric meters around. Our evolution has been: an engineering distributor, cable TV, computer maintenance, telecommunications and smart energy, the latter of which is starting to grow. What have you learned from all this? At the end of the day, you’ve got to keep changing or you die. We actually did an analysis of how many companies actually made it to 100 years old, the old analogy is, normally it takes the first generation to start it, the second
Does Mills have any direct competition?
Well, it’s not of interest to them, the third generation, they’ve moved on. But because we reinvented ourselves so many times, we’ve now got a completely new business, one that’s obviously enough of an interest for my son now to come into the business; he joined us in 2015. My wish is that it’ll go on to even more generations, but I mean obviously Elliot’s fourth generation. He’s getting married in August. So whether there’ll be any more, a fifth generation of Mills at some particular stage, I don’t know. That’s some way off.
Our biggest competitors are Comtec Netceed and Telenco. We differentiate ourselves in many respects but we can say we are the largest independent distributor in the UK. I wouldn’t say that we’ve got a lot of competition out there. There are lot of smaller guys that have got into this growth of the Altnets, but I personally think they’re probably going to struggle a little bit now. TeLL US about the Altnets. I suppose they started to grow around 2016, 2017; the whole thing went mad during COVID. The business plan seemed to be - we’re going to go into this new area and we’re going to deliver fast fibre.
Has Brexit impacted your business?
Brexit is the most disastrous thing that this country’s ever done. It’s had a big impact. We had quite a lot of customers
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Volume 46 No.1 March 2024
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