Memory crunch makes refurbished kit look a lot less secondhand
Rising memory prices are pushing more customers toward refurbished tech, suppliers say, with warranties of up to three years helping to make secondhand kit a less daunting purchase.
Key points
- XTENTEC collects, refurbishes, rents, and resells equipment, and has an agreement with HP to renovate aging products, with a two or even three-year warranty available as "just an SKU on the list from HP." Joosten said equivalent support, including HP Care Pack services, helped make refurbished equipment more attractive to buyers.
- Ben Caddy, senior analyst at Omdia, said suppliers were linking refresh discussions with opportunities to recover value from customers' aging kit.
- Refurbished smartphones are growing in popularity, but persuading customers to trade in their old devices remains a constraint on supply.
Marcel Joosten, group director of marketing and digital commerce at tech lifecycle specialist XTENTEC, said the company now offers trade-ins when customers buy new kit.
Memory costs have more than quadrupled this year as manufacturers prioritize more lucrative high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for servers powering AI datacenters.
Additional details
- And I think one of the things that we have to be better at as a whole is that we kind of need to have a standard methodology regarding verification." Work on verification standards with vendors including HP, Lenovo, and Dell is ongoing, Molberg said.
- "We're actually financing the residual value" at the end of year two, three, or four, when customers return the equipment, he told the audience.
- He also argued that lifecycle services should be built into purchasing decisions rather than added three or four years later.
- Joosten argued that listed US tech companies' focus on quarterly sales and market share can work against refurbishment.
- Customers want to cut their carbon footprint, and many public and private sector tenders require it.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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