The Career-Long Bet on Making Electronics Last
Dan Perez studied political science at UCLA. That detail matters more than it first appears. He came into electronics manufacturing not from an engineering bench but from a systems perspective - how organizations move, how processes compound, how you make something that already works bigger and more durable. Fourteen years at IBM gave him the foundation. The rest of his career is a demonstration.
At IBM, he cycled through increasingly responsible roles in manufacturing and planning. IBM in its prime was less a technology company than a precision logistics operation, and Perez learned the rhythms of large-scale industrial systems at close range. When he left for Solectron in 1991, he brought that operational wiring with him.
"Our new name, mission and brand identity represent a deepening of our commitment to maximizing device value for customers, investing in innovation and protecting the environment and communities where we operate."- Daniel Perez, on the 2020 Reconext rebrand
Solectron was already one of the world's premier electronics manufacturing services companies when Perez joined. His mandate as EVP of worldwide sales, account management, and marketing was to find and keep the customers who kept Solectron's factories running. By the time his tenure ended, those factories were running a lot harder: company revenues had climbed from $250 million to over $12 billion. That's not a rounding error - it's a 48x expansion. The kind of growth that rewrites how an industry talks about itself.
Most executives who've lived inside a $12 billion operation don't walk away from it to start from scratch. Perez did. He co-founded OnCore Manufacturing Services, targeting a very different customer profile than Solectron's broad industrial base - defense and aerospace, medical devices, industrial OEMs. Markets where "good enough" is a career-ending phrase. Under his leadership, OnCore grew tenfold from $30 million to over $300 million through a combination of acquisitions and organic growth, establishing itself as a quality-first operator in markets that tolerate nothing less.
In April 2017, Perez made a different kind of bet. He joined Clover Wireless as CEO and Executive Chairman - a company operating in the aftermarket for wireless devices, handling trade-ins, refurbishment, and asset recovery. It was a space he could see getting structurally larger. Smartphone upgrade cycles were shortening. Sustainability pressures were mounting. The value locked in used electronics was getting harder to ignore.
"We are excited by the critical resources and geographic advantages that the Memphis area enables us to offer our expanding customer base."- Daniel Perez, on Reconext's Memphis expansion
The defining move came in December 2019. Clover Wireless acquired Teleplan International N.V. - a European electronics supply chain services company with a footprint spanning the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific. It was a significant integration challenge: two companies with different geographies, cultures, and operational histories being stitched into a single operation. Teleplan's CEO, Francois Lacombe, joined the combined company as President and Managing Director, reporting to Perez.
Nine months later, in September 2020, the rebrand landed: Reconext. The name is deliberate - "reconditioning" and "next," pointing toward what the company does and where it intends to go. The rebrand wasn't cosmetic. It was a declaration that two companies had become one, with a unified mission around the circular economy. Perez framed it as a "deepening of commitment" - the kind of language that means less when companies are optimistic and more when it shows up in capital allocation decisions.
Reconext's 40-year history stretches back to a television repair shop in Frankfurt, Germany, founded in 1983. That lineage gives the circular economy rhetoric actual roots. The company now operates across 22+ service centers in key regions worldwide. Its proprietary automation platforms have names that suggest their seriousness: Hydra handles automated cleaning, Optiline runs AI-driven cosmetic grading, Proteus manages data erasure, and Titan handles automated device testing. These are not off-the-shelf tools - they represent years of investment in making the messy, variable work of reconditioning used devices consistent and scalable.
Reconext serves manufacturers, retailers, insurers, data centers, and large corporations. Its end-to-end lifecycle services cover returns management and fulfillment, testing and grading, repair and refurbishment, asset recovery, and trade-in and buyback programs - a full-stack approach to electronics aftermarket that makes it harder for any single competitor to replicate. The company employs over 400 engineers company-wide and operates class-100 clean rooms, burn-in systems, anodizing equipment, automated conveyance, robotic processing lines, and full reliability testing labs.
The Memphis expansion - announced with more than $9 million in investment and projected to create over 200 jobs - illustrates both the logistics logic behind Reconext and Perez's approach to growth. Memphis, with its FedEx hub and central geography, allows the company to reach 95% of global consumers by air within 72 hours. That's not a press release statistic - it's the operational backbone of a returns management and refurbishment business.