Federica Laricchia
Research expert covering the global consumer technology industry
Refurbished smartphones in the U.S. - statistics & facts
Nowadays, it would be hard to live without a smartphone, and yet not everybody is able or willing to purchase expensive devices of this kind. Indeed, today, the price of a new smartphone model can easily exceed 1,000 U.S. dollars. To counter this, smartphone vendors, as well as consumer electronics retailers, invest in and offer refurbished smartphones, allowing consumers to obtain devices across all price ranges more affordably. Not only does this benefit consumers, but it also contributes to a more sustainable approach towards device production by manufacturers.
On the way to sustainable tech
Striving for electronic waste reduction, tech companies are adopting a more sustainable approach, for example manufacturing devices with recycled materials. Furthermore, in 2022, Apple and Samsung have made available their self-repair services, providing original smartphone parts and tools to enable customers to repair their own devices. These factors have been contributing to the growth of the refurbished consumer electronics market, an industry is flourishing all over the world, including in the United States. Particularly, the size of the American reconditioned consumer electronics market peaked at over 24 billion U.S. dollars in 2022, while the size of the electronic and computer repair service market reached 21 billion U.S. dollars in the same year.The United States: A growing market, but not a leader
The U.S. is among the most technologically advanced countries in the world, and its advanced smartphone and 5G technologies are said to play a big role in the expansion of the refurbished smartphone market. However, in recent years, India and Latin America have been leading the global refurbished smartphone market in terms of growth, with over 413 million reconditioned smartphones expected to be shipped by 2026. In the same year, North America will account for roughly 25 percent of the market.Smartphone lose values in time
As with every other product, smartphones lose product in time. In the United States, iPhones and Samsung Galaxys are among the smartphones with the lowest depreciation rates, namely, the percentage calculated dividing the number of months since the average price by the months since the phone’s launch date. As of September 2023, the iPhone 14 Pro Max had the lowest depreciation rate in the country, around 36 percent, while the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra lost 43 percent of its original trade-in value.
