Phone salvage

Germans' love affair with cell phones shows no sign of waning, with nearly 30 million devices expected to be sold this year.

That's certainly good news for phone manufacturers. But what about the more than 70 million phones lying dormant in drawers across the country, many of them still operable and all of them containing precious metals like gold and silver?

A number of e-commerce start-ups and, more recently, Amazon and eBay have entered the business of buying used, operable phones and reselling them at a profit, while a few other companies see even greater potential in harvesting their precious metals.

Buying and reselling

Wirkaufens, Flip4New, Mobile2Cash, reBuy and Zonzoo are among the growing cadre of e-commerce companies in Germany busily buying up used cell phones and reselling them to consumers directly or indirectly through dealers or other Internet companies like Amazon or eBay.

"Our business is growing steadily, up from 2,000 phones per month at the beginning of the year to 6,000 per month today," said Kamil Fijalkowski, a spokesman for Wirkaufens.

The process for selling used phones to Wirkaufens follows a basic format used by its rivals: Consumers go to the company's website, answer a handful of questions about their phones, such as manufacturer, model and battery quality, and are quoted a price.

After accepting the price, they ship the phone, which is checked. If the device matches the condition described, they receive their money within a couple of days.

Wirkaufens buys some older, simple phones for as little as 2 euros but can easily pay more than 200 euros for newer smartphones. The average price is around 80 euros. The company resells the phones mostly through Amazon and eBay but also does some larger sales with dealers.

"There's certainly a new way of thinking about old cell phones," Fijalkowski told Deutsche Welle. "People increasingly want to sell and make some money from their old phones as they do with their old cars."

Easy to use

A spokesman for rival reBuy cites consumers' growing use of the Internet to buy and sell products as a reason for the rising interest in its used cell phone service. "People are a lot more comfortable with e-commerce these days and our Internet service is very easy for them to use," he told Deutsche Welle.

To compete, Zonzoo offers free shipping and also accepts phones that no longer work, paying 40 percent of the value of an operating model. "We recycle older or broken phones with certified partners in Germany," said Lena Levin, marketing and PR manager at Zonzoo.

Indeed, interest in recycling mobile phones in Germany is growing as well, driven in part by new regulations preventing electronic devices from being tossed in household garbage but mostly by soaring prices for precious metals.

For instance, the price of tantalum - which is extracted from the metallic mineral coltan mined in Australia and Central Africa and used to build capacitors in cell phones - has gone through the roof in recent years.

Lünen-based environmental services company Remondis sees a new business evolving in extracting precious metals from old cell phone components. "There's about 18 to 22 milligrams of gold in every cell phone," company spokesman Michael Schneider told Deutsche Welle. "Alone, that's not much but it adds up fast if you consider the millions of old cell phones out there."

The company is currently testing a drop-off service for old cell phones with two large retailers.

Author: John Blau
Editor: Sam Edmonds