Ahead of the launch of a new phone this Wednesday tech giant Samsung has stated. It hopes to be able to refurbish the Galaxy Note 7 handsets that were recalled last year and make them available for sale. Over 2.5 million Note 7 handsets currently sit in Samsungs warehouses after a battery fault meant they were liable to catch fire, which resulted in them being recalled for safety reasons.Environmental group Greenpeace has been lobbying Samsung for a statement on what they intended to do with them.
Before Samsung would be able to refurbish and resell the mobiles they would require approval from the regulators and phone networks. Back in January US carrier Verizon revealed that there were still thousands of Note 7 phones that users had not returned. This is possibly because they felt that their phone was working OK and didn’t feel they needed to return it. Verizon said they intended to divert calls made from these handsets to its operators to get the handsets recalled.
If Samsungs plan to recondition and resell the phones falls through then their other option would involve stripping the phones for the components. While they would recover some revenue from doing that – due to the mobiles having precious metals in them – it would not make them anywhere near as much as reselling them as complete handsets.