Refurbished products owned by the French 2018

Refurbished products slowly but surely managed to get lot of traction in France. In 2018, almost half of the French population indeed declared that they had already owned a refurbished smartphone, and 11 percent a refurbished tablet. Refurbishment consists in the distribution of products, mostly electronics, that have been returned to the manufacturer before being tested, repaired if necessary and then resold. These second-hand products offer a cheaper alternative in the current ever-changing technological landscape, encouraging launches to follow one another at an increasingly frenetic pace, sometimes at prohibitive costs.

Refurbished smartphones first and foremost

Smartphones usually top the list of most-owned refurbished products and are the products French consumers intend to buy second-hand before anything else. This is no surprise as the smartphone penetration in France experienced a dazzling rise between 2011 and 2018 and it’s nowadays almost impossible to envision our daily routine without mobile devices. Moreover, the topic of technological obsolescence works in favor of the refurbishing market. According to a study conducted in 2019, mobile phones were among the devices with the shortest technological cycles and half of them were renewed after two or three years of use.

An international success

While the refurbishing market is developing well in France, this phenomenon is far from reaching the sales rates of refurbished products in other parts of the world, such as India or Latin America. In 2017, the revenue of the refurbished smartphones market was expected to reach 14 billion U.S. dollars.