【SHARED】Kit | Unsellable travellers’ SIM cards—Apliu Street stall reseller resorts to selling local products
Journalist: HK Feature
Photographer: HK Feature
With the world under lockdown and travellers’ SIMs becoming unsellable, how do SIM card stalls in Apliu Street survive?
Despite the pandemic, the usual shoppers continue to visit Apliu Street in Sham Shui Po and its specialist stalls for electronic products and components. However, stalls selling travellers’ SIMs are the sole anomalies in this situation. Kit, the owner of Yik Fung SIM cards, recounted how travellers’ SIMs used to be their highest-selling product, making up 70% of revenue. But now, demand for them is virtually zero.
After the outbreak of coronavirus, Hongkongers’ increased need for local SIM cards surprisingly provided his business with a lifeline. “Students now use Zoom for their online lessons, office workers working from home also use Zoom for business meetings and social purposes, many at home also binge watch shows. For all those people, their usual data allowance of 6GB is not enough, and so they’d come to buy extra data SIMs.”
Photo provided by HK Feature
Despite the pivot, Kit admitted that their revenue is still less than before and, honestly speaking, he does not have much hope for the future of his business, and can only take things one step at a time. But did he think about changing careers temporarily, waiting until the pandemic is over to continue business? Kit replied, even if he wanted to, it would not be possible. “Money isn’t the problem, the problem is I don’t have the money [yet]. I’ve spent all my money on my current products, so I don’t have any capital to change my operations. The only thing I can do now is carry on with the current business.”
Support our Journalism with a Contribution
Many people might not know this, but despite our large team of contributors, which we are immensely grateful for, We Are HKers is still a small bootstrapped group that runs on no outside funding and loans. Everything you see today is built on the backs of warriors who have sacrificed opportunities, time, meals and sleep to help give HKers all over the world a voice and keep our culture alive.
However, we still face many trials in the running of our platform, from finding the necessary equipment for our video interviews, to subscribing to the necessary tools to facilitate our remote work process of our global team, to trying not to get fired from our main jobs as we run this project secretly in the background, and to keeping our platform running and storing our files securely.
We hope you consider making a contribution, so we can continue to provide you with moving stories of HKers all over the world and keep our heritage and culture alive. Even a £1 contribution goes a long way. Thank you for everyone’s support. We love you all and can’t appreciate you guys enough.
**Please note that your support of We Are HKers Ltd. does NOT constitute a charitable donation. We really appreciate your support in independent journalism. If you have any questions about contributing to We Are HKers, please contact us here.
- February 2022
- December 2021
- August 2021
- May 2021
- April 2021
- March 2021
- February 2021
- January 2021
- December 2020
- November 2020
- October 2020
- September 2020
- August 2020
- July 2020
- June 2020
- May 2020
- April 2020
- March 2020
- February 2020
- January 2020
- December 2019
- November 2019
- October 2019
- September 2019
- July 2019
- June 2019
Original article: 外遊卡滯銷檔主「逆風」賣本地卡求存 - 誌HK Feature
(This story is supported by HK Feature and modified.)