Refurbished devices account for 10% of European phone market – Swappie
Refurbished phones account for 10% of the smartphone market in Europe, according to a white paper from Swappie. Furthermore, 25% of preowned-phones are either recycled or sold in Europe.
The Finnish company is making its presence felt in the Irish secondary market by doing two things: focusing on iPhones and putting a premium on customer experience. Employing more than 750 people in Europe, Ireland is Swappie’s only English-language market.
Chief technology officer Jori Ahvonen told TechCentral.ie that the company’s heritage was in repairs before branching out into direct sales.
“Refurbished devices is a growing market,” he explained. “Looking at cars, half of revenue in that market comes from used cars. Similarly when we look at refurbished devices. When we started the market was non-existent.”
Ahvonen sees the market for devices could be evenly split into new and refurbished within only a few years, helped in part by manufacturers tending towards incremental improvements over mould-breaking innovation. At present, 50% of consumers upgrading are looking to second hand smartphones as a cost-saving measure and 71% would be more inclined to repair a phone than replace it outright.
“When we look at how the market has grown in Europe is has been gaining share all the time,” he said. “The key reason is that the phones are not getting much better every year. When we look at improvements they’re much more incremental.”
Swappie found its place in the market thanks to its support for iPhones, which account for about 25% of the smartphone market in Europe. The company uses a robust diagnostics process that includes software, hardware, automation and manual testing. Ahvonen said the company has more than 100 separate steps to validate the devices it looks to resell and perform repairs where necessary.
Apple has had a tense relationship with legislators in the US and Europe over the ‘right to repair’ – a cornerstone of sustainability efforts reliant on making spare parts available to third parties.
Ahvonen said OEMs in general have been keen on controlling the repair value chain themselves, including tracking which parts are working together in a given device by serial number. Such ‘parts pairing’ has been viewed as an opaque process. Right to repair allows third parties to salvage spare components in a way that wasn’t possible before.
As for how the Irish market is performing so far, Ahvonen is happy with Swappie’s performance. “We’ve been here quite a while. It can be quite hard to get a foothold in some markets. “We have an end-to-end system that makes our process robust. We want to see this model develop in Ireland.”
With the market for refurbished smartphones in Europe worth an estimated €15 billion, almost half of which is accounted for by demand for iPhones, Swappie has tapped into a particular market, one which shows no sign of slowing.
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