June Round Up
Be Kind, Rewind...
Halfway through the year and Wimbledon is back on. I know it’s only Wednesday but you have my express permission to pick up a punnet of strawberries, grab a pint of Pimms (add a splash of Gin or Vodka) and kick back with a serving of last month’s items that are worth a mention…
Market
After Counterpoint signalled the expected slowdown in Q1 2026 smartphone shipments, despite revenues rising 8%,1 worse news came along in June as they predicted that 2026 would see “smartphone shipments to post worst annual decline on record”. Counterpoint tend to be fairly measured in their musings, so reading that they expect shipments to fall 13.9% YoY, hitting the lowest annual volume since 2013 at 1.08 billion units, suggests that it might be worse than that.2 Key to the decline is the reallocation of processing capacity to AI high bandwidth memory and server DRAM. Counterpoint state that lower-end OEMs and emerging markets face the most pressure, with Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo announcing cuts of up to 30%.3 Counterpoint also suggest that Apple and Samsung are the most insulated, but as I reported back in April,4 we are not talking 200mm PIR boards here, as we all saw the price rises on MacBooks and iPads last week.5
As noted in the FT article, it’s rare for Apple to announce overnight price increases on two complete product lines and I found it interesting that the iPhone remained out of scope (for now). There’s a good note here from Runar Bjorhovde. I’d suggest Apple have both eyes firmly on the iPhone 18 launch in a few months: with record sales of the iPhone 17 in the US and China,6 two of their biggest markets, and suppressed demand in many of the larger European markets, keeping the iPhone 18 pricing as competitive as possible seems the only option, especially if you’re dropping the highly anticipated foldable device which is likely to occupy the very top end of the pricing structure.7
Now, fewer new phone shipments and sales would seem to play right into the hands of the secondary market. But news from my other favourite research company suggests that used devices might become even harder to get hold of. In the latest Mobile Buying Guide, FDM CCS Insight found that over 40% of respondents say they replaced their previous phone because it was damaged or no longer functioning properly with a further 3 to 9% citing loss or theft. In other words, close to half of phones are now bought out of necessity rather than aspiration. Nearly one third of Brits plan to keep their old phone as a back-up compared with 18% planning to trade it in. The survey covers more than 5,000 consumers in the UK, Germany, Spain, the US and India.8
If you do manage to get a phone back from the customer, you’ll be trying not to think too much about grading. So to take the misery out of standards variation, the CTIA announced the latest version (5.1) of their Wireless Device Grading Scales Criteria and Definitions which, for the first time, bolts a consumer facing tier on top of the wholesale grading scales. Whilst it’s a big step in the right direction, we are still a long way from consistency because a) it’s voluntary and b) you can name the grade whatever you like. Still, as I argue in the Market Analysis: Device Condition Grading 2026 article, the approach is really worth a closer look and could form the basis for a European standard.
In Europe, after five years as President of EUREFAS,9 the association representing the refurbishment industry, Augustin Becquet stepped down as President. Having led the association to help shape all major European policy initiatives, including the Ecodesign and Right to Repair, as well as launching the EUREFAS Quality Label,10 M. Becquet is set to remain on the board alongside newly elected Patrick Höijer, CEO of Foxway.
I saw this “EU to mandate user-replaceable smartphone batteries from 2027” do the rounds again in June, this time from RetechDays News.11 I refer you to my April Round Up in which I stated the reality is more nuanced: Annex II, point B 1.1(5)(c)(ii) of Regulation (EU) 2023/1670 permits manufacturers to restrict battery supply to professional repairers provided the device simultaneously meets IP67, a remaining capacity of at least 83% at 500 full charge cycles, and 80% at 1,000 full charge cycles.12
ReLondon, the Mayor's circular economy partnership, published the fourth in its series of city footprint studies last month, this one on electricals and electronics, analysed by Oxford's engineering department.13 The framing will be familiar to anyone in recommerce: of the carbon tied to the equipment London consumes, 92% is embodied before the device ever crosses the M25, locked in during extraction and manufacture. But the general figures are arresting in their own right; London households now sit on roughly 700kg of electricals each, buy 57.8kg of new kit a year and bin 30.2kg, throwing away some 16,200 tonnes annually in a directly reusable state, about 15% of disposals by weight. The report models reuse as the most effective lever, a reduction of up to 4.7% against the 2024 household baseline, comfortably ahead of repair or improved collection. Repair, awkwardly, barely moves under the ambitious scenario, because fixing more devices means fitting more new components, and the batteries and parts carry embodied carbon of their own; a counter narrative to the assumption that repair is unconditionally the greener option. The study excludes the use phase entirely, so the running cost of all this equipment sits outside the numbers; and the authors are candid that their reuse and repair data, scaled up from the likes of Repair Café and the North London voucher scheme, is fair to poor in places. Of that voucher scheme, one detail will interest the protection crowd: of 4,000 applications, 42% were to repair smartphones, comfortably the most fixed item in the city.14
Companies
Twenty-five years after BT’s international joint venture with AT&T broke down, they are at it again but this time with Verizon.15 The two companies are combining their international enterprise arms into a 50:50 joint venture, a Jersey-incorporated, UK tax-domiciled NewCo serving some 3,000 multinational customers across 180-odd countries on roughly $4bn of combined revenue, with Verizon paying BT a $625m equalisation cheque and booking a $700m to $800m held-for-sale loss to get its contribution out of the door. Completion is pencilled in for 2027. Whilst not directly relevant to the device lifecycle, the structure is worth a second look. There is no buyout option for either party, which locks the 50:50 in place and rules out either parent quietly absorbing the other; against that, Allison Kirkby's description of the venture as a possible "platform for further consolidation" can only point one way, namely NewCo as an acquirer of other carriers' subscale international divisions rather than a stepping stone to control.
VMO2 published a standalone Green Transition Plan fleshing out the climate strand and committing to net zero across its entire value chain by 2040, with a 90% cut to Scope 1 and 2 emissions and a halving of Scope 3 by 2030.16 It claims a 63% reduction in Scope 1 and 2 against 2020 already banked. The circularity targets I covered last month reappear unchanged, so there is nothing new in the plan for the secondary sector; the substance is all on the carbon side. The timing, however, was unfortunate. The plan landed the same morning the company's euro 2032 bond touched an all-time low of 91 cents, with its long-dated paper marked to yield close to 9%, Fitch having cut it to B+ a few weeks earlier on leverage running towards 6.0x.17 A net-zero-by-2040 ambition is a long horizon to be setting out on the day the debt market is repricing your next refinancing; the planet's timescale and the bondholders' rarely align, and on 29 June they were pulling in visibly different directions. Feels like Telefónica’s new London offices might come along with some closer oversight.18
In time for all those additional O2 devices, Likewize and Apkudo announced they have extended their device automation partnership.19 The partnership introduces fully robotic processing for foldable smartphones, flip phones and tablets across Likewize’s UK and European operations, increasing processing capacity to the equivalent of one device every 15 seconds. According to the Mobile News article, CEO and co-founder of Apkudo, Josh Matthews, said the move will help Likewize prepare for upcoming EU Digital Product Passport regulations by creating a detailed record of a device’s history, helping partners meet future compliance requirements. I am not sure which version of the DPP this is preparing for. There is no current delegated act for smartphones yet and the current data categories cover either provenance, identity, traceability and compliance, or sustainability information. Outside of this a “detailed history” can only reside inside an Apkudo or Likewize proprietary data layer. I argue the case for independent data ownership here and Peter C Evans’ article on the push for a single device ledger is also worth a read.
Great to see more competition in the automated grading space and after a year in stealth, Proofen launched their desk-sized machine for pre-owned electronics. Insert a smartphone, foldable, tablet or smartwatch and get a grade in seconds, tied to the IMEI and shareable via their platform.20 Co-founder Marijn Berk built it after eight years watching grading disputes destroy margins, the same device drawing a different grade depending on who picked it up. A faithful description of the problem, and another addition to it? For the grade is tied to an IMEI, which the GSMA registries hold as identity, not condition, and shared via a Proofen platform, which is to say yet another data layer. It prompts the same question as the Apkudo record before it: a detailed history appended to which DPP record, exactly? There is no smartphone passport to receive it.
Without standardised grading and a single device ledger, every machine that solves grading is just building walls.
Another pint of Pimms, anyone?
MediaMarkt Switzerland made refurbished smartphones a permanent retail line in June, rolling them out across all 44 Swiss stores and online.21 The devices are refurbished by Recommerce, certified in Switzerland through testing, grading, data wiping and quality control, and sold with a 24-month warranty. The partnership itself is not new; Recommerce has handled MediaMarkt Switzerland's trade-in since 2024, so this extends the same relationship from the intake side to the sell side, one refurbisher now capturing both ends of the retailer's device flow. The rollout follows February's Swiss Marketplace launch, which already let third parties sell smartphones through the platform, so the direction of travel is clear enough: refurbished moving from the margins to a core MediaMarkt category.
Assurant delivered its Q1 infographic,22 reporting $1.63bn returned to US consumers, up 31% year on year, alongside the 32.1% jump in devices serviced to 7.4m noted in my Q1 equipment piece.23 Assurant framed this as rising value, but the $1.63bn is a gross pool, and the explanation it offers, wider participation and more carriers accepting any-condition devices, is a widening funnel rather than a richer one. With T-Mobile postpaid upgrade rate flat at 2.8% and average trade-in age unmoved at 3.81 years, neither demand nor upgrade timing has shifted. The growth is far more likely the new T-Mobile logistics agreement and the onboarded Best Buy programme flowing through Assurant's pipes, supply being routed in, not consumers upgrading sooner. The iPhone 13 leading for a fifth quarter and the Galaxy S23 Ultra newly top on Android tell the same steady-state story; a trade-in cohort running three to four years behind the sales cohort, exactly where the 3.81-year age puts it.
Iliad Italia's 2025 Sustainability Report gave the refurbished-device story its first hard number, and it was pretty modest. The refurbished-smartphone sales initiative, launched in June 2024, reached 2% of the Group's total mobile phone sales across 2025.24 So "continuing to promote refurbished smartphones," as the press coverage put it, amounts to one handset in fifty; a toe in the water rather than the wholesale pivot the framing implied. The router side is the stronger circular story, though it belongs to the Group rather than Italy: the combined Freebox and iliadbox reconditioning rate (units refurbished per hundred sent to the plants) rose to 69% in 2025 from 60% the year before, against a customer return rate holding around 90%.
Back Market refreshed its leadership, I think, or at least the org chart.25 Founder Thibaud Hug de Larauze becomes Executive Chairman, taking “long-term strategy and ecosystem-wide transformation,” sounding much like a CEO’s responsibilities while CFO Clément Petit switches to CEO, taking “operational execution and day-to-day delivery”, which sounds much like a COO’s responsibilities.
There was limited news from the protection sector this month other than Samsung Canada introducing monthly pay for Samsung Care+26 and I thought we might even go two full months without hearing about a new bolttech partnership and then they announced a partnership with ING.27 The insurtech has been selected as ING's strategic partner for embedded insurance and protection across Europe, already live in the Netherlands, Italy, Poland and Belgium with more markets to follow and launched alongside the bank's new global subscriptions model. The release was generic about which protection products, and device protection specifically is not named. My recollection is that ING stepped back from standalone device cover some time ago in favour of offering a household policy with device protection bundled in. Either way, it fits the pattern that bolttech continue to spread across banking, automotive and telco channels.
After reporting on the Exertis drama at the back end of last year, it was sad to read that they finally entered administration. Spare a thought for all those adversely affected. Good article on the whole messy affair here. I am sure the communications team at Aurelius would like me to reiterate that MTR Group is owned by Exertis Ireland and remains unaffected by these events.
Investments
June was pretty light for any sector specific deals. More widely of course the Bouygues Telecom, Orange and Iliad carve up of SFR is now going through the grinder for €20.35bn.28 I noted that it was reported bolttech has shifted from private equity and venture investors to strategic partners in its $147m Series C, with CEO Rob Schimek “seeking deeper alliances with investors who won’t shift their priorities”, (ouch) presumably he means from growth to profit. Who’d have thought it.29 And as Vinted piled into Tilt for its $26m funding round,30 I am left bemused by the hype around live selling after Whatnot’s $11.5bn valuation last year.31 If you want a glimpse of where all this ends up, QVC, the firm that invented the entire genre back when the host had to mime down the telephone, spent Q1 2026 in Chapter 11 picking at $6.5bn of debt, freshly booted off Nasdaq after a 1-for-50 reverse split, $120m behind on its preferred dividends and reduced to guesting on TikTok Shop like a tribute act to its own format. If you’re after a terminal value, take a look at their latest filing.
One for the road, anyone?
Peace
sb.
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