Start with the number, because it is the kind that settles an argument. In the first quarter of 2026, panel makers shipped 298 million displays into the refurbished phone market.

They shipped 289 million to the companies that make new phones.

The refurbished figure was up 20% year on year, according to Omdia. The two lines crossed, and the second-hand side is the one still climbing.

What that number actually counts

Refurbishment here is broader than a shop selling you a used handset. Omdia counts panels going into consumer repairs, into the professional refurbishment of recycled phones, and into aftermarket replacement parts.

So the figure captures cracked screens as well as resold devices. It is the whole business of keeping an existing phone alive rather than replacing it.

The technology split is telling. OLED made up 7% of refurbished market shipments in the quarter, up from 2% a year earlier, which means the rest is still LCD.

Read that as the premium phones of three or four years ago now entering their second life.

Panel makers did not choose this. They went looking

The cause runs back to memory. High memory prices pushed component costs up, phone makers cut their build plans, and the orders panel factories were expecting did not arrive.

Omdia expects display demand from new phones to fall 12% across 2026. Capacity does not idle politely while that happens.

Joy Guo, a senior principal analyst in Omdia’s displays practice, put it in terms of storage rather than growth. The refurbishment market “acts like a reservoir that helps absorb fluctuations in demand from smartphone manufacturers”, she said.

A reservoir is not a market you target. It is where the overflow goes.

The phone market this overflow came from

The new-phone side of the ledger explains the rest. Global smartphone shipments fell 6% in the second quarter to 272 million units, down from 288.9 million a year earlier.

The pain was not evenly shared. Xiaomi fell 26% to 31.2 million, a second consecutive quarterly decline, and more than half its shipments sit below $200.

That is the segment where a component cost increase cannot be absorbed. OPPO, which includes OnePlus and realme, fell 17% to 28.4 million while cutting entry-level models to protect margin. Vivo fell 18%.

Not all of the decline is about components. Shipments to the Middle East fell 18% on geopolitical disruption to supply chains and retail, which Omdia treats as temporary and expects to stabilise in the second half.

The desk has tracked each stage of the rest. Memory costs have already produced a fifth quarterly fall in Chinese shipments, and the same squeeze has been working through the PC market.

Two companies grew, for opposite reasons

Samsung shipped 60.5 million, up 5%, and took 22% of the market. It makes its own memory, and Omdia credits that vertical integration for letting it absorb the shortage better than rivals.

It also picked up entry-level share, because Chinese competitors trimmed their ranges and raised prices. Owning the scarce component turns out to be worth more than owning the cheapest phone.

Apple had its best second quarter on record, shipping 55.1 million, up 23%, for a 20% share in what is normally its weakest quarter.

That one carries an asterisk. Channel partners loaded up on base iPhone 17 stock in anticipation of price rises and a dearer iPhone 18, so some of the growth is inventory rather than demand. Apple has already raised iPhone 17 prices in Japan.

The part that does not reverse

Here is the argument worth taking seriously, and it is Omdia’s own. Prices did not simply rise. Expectations rose with them.

Consumers have spent a year getting used to higher phone prices, which gives manufacturers room to set their pricing from that higher base once memory costs eventually fall. Omdia calls it “a structural repricing of the smartphone market, where profitability increasingly takes precedence over volume expansion”.

“Price is once again becoming a competitive differentiator,” said Le Xuan Chiew, a research manager at Omdia.

Amber Liu, a practice leader at the firm, expects no quick recovery. Shipments will keep declining despite flagship launches, holiday promotions and shopping festivals, she said.

The caveat matters. This is a forecast about future pricing behaviour, not an observed fact, and it assumes consumers stay recalibrated rather than simply buying less.

The industry’s own fix feeds the second-hand market

Omdia expects manufacturers to respond to higher prices by making them easier to swallow. That means more device financing, wider trade-in schemes, more bundles, and more revenue from services.

Look at where a trade-in goes. A phone handed back at the counter is precisely the device that gets refurbished, fitted with a new panel and sold again.

So the mechanism the industry is using to protect new-phone sales is also supplying the market that competes with them. It is a closed loop, and only one end of it is growing.

The rest of the outlook is grim in an orderly way. Channel inventory has normalised, but component costs keep supply tight and prices high, and Omdia expects no broad recovery in volumes until those costs start falling.

Europe’s stake is the second-hand one

This is where it lands on this side of the Atlantic. Europe has spent years legislating towards longer device lifespans, and Germany has already moved on security updates and the right to repair.

Those rules were written as environmental policy. They now describe the cheapest way to own a phone.

A supply chain that has quietly reoriented towards repairs and refurbishment is the industrial version of the same argument, arrived at by accident rather than by regulation.

The market also has an obvious floor under it. Cheap new phones are the ones being cut, and the desk has covered how the memory crisis reached cheap smartphones first.

What would settle it

Two things are checkable rather than rhetorical. The first is whether the crossover holds in the second quarter, because one quarter is a data point and two is a trend.

The second is what happens when memory prices fall. If new-phone prices come down with them, this was a squeeze. If they stay where they are, Omdia was right and the industry has quietly moved its floor.

The refurbished market will answer that question either way. It grows when new phones are expensive, and it is currently growing faster than the thing it replaces.

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