Why did old phones suddenly become valuable?

Q: Recently, topics such as “3 old phones can be traded for an iPhone” and “old phone buyback prices surge by 5–6 times” have successively made it onto the trending search lists. Why have old phones that used to gather dust at home become “hot commodities,” with one price changing day to day?

A: The main reason for the recent rise in old phone buyback prices is that the AI wave has driven tight overall production capacity for storage chips. This has led to a mismatch between supply and demand for consumer-grade storage, pushing prices higher. Since the expansion and new production cycles for chips are long and costs are high, downstream manufacturers instead buy back large numbers of old phones to disassemble them and use the chips to make up the shortage, thereby driving up old phone buyback prices.

Primarily driven by secondary use of storage chips

Discarded phones are no longer simply treated as garbage. Instead, they mainly enter the process of disassembling components and reusing them—especially relying on secondary use of storage chips.

For example, for smart hardware manufacturers supplying smart door locks, surveillance cameras, and in-vehicle infotainment head units, these chips serve as low-cost core storage components. They are used for repairing older devices and expanding memory. They are also adapted for niche digital products such as entry-level tablets and learning devices—so their uses are very broad.

Choose official buyback channels as much as possible

Old phones contain massive amounts of sensitive personal data, including photos, contacts, and payment records. Illegitimate buyback channels may use technical means to recover deleted data and even traffic users’ information.

Before selling, consumers should transfer photos, contacts, chat records, and other data to a new device or to the cloud, log out from all payment, social, and cloud service accounts, and log out from all applications on the old device as well. If necessary, they should also change the passwords of important accounts. After restoring factory settings, they can load some unrelated content and format again; by repeating this 2 to 3 times, they can completely overwrite traces of the original data.

Consumers should choose official buyback platforms or offline authorized stores for transactions whenever possible. Conduct a thorough inspection of the phone in advance, including brand, model, appearance, screen, battery, and whether other functions are working properly, and truthfully inform the buyback party to avoid affecting the buyback price. When handing in a phone, ask the buyback party for a buyback receipt, indicating information such as the phone model, buyback price, and transaction time, for later reference or use in pursuing rights and remedies.

(By/ Economic Daily reporter Huang Xin)

【Source: China Business Network】