India’s refurbished smartphone sector is moving upmarket, with premium devices, particularly Apple iPhones, capturing a larger share of demand in 2025, signalling a significant industry transformation.
India’s refurbished smartphone market is moving decisively upmarket, with premium devices taking a larger share of demand and Apple consolidating its lead. Cashify’s Great Indian Upgrade 2026 report says refurbished phone demand rose 30.8% in 2025, while the share of devices priced above ₹45,000 climbed to 17.4%. The ₹20,000 to ₹45,000 band remained the largest segment, but the sub-₹10,000 category slipped to about 8.4% of direct-to-consumer sales from 10.7% in 2024.
Apple now accounts for more than 65% of refurbished smartphone sales on Cashify’s platform, with the iPhone 13 emerging as the most frequently traded and repurchased model. The report says iPhone 13 devices represented 6.93% of buybacks and as much as 15.5% of refurbished sales, while the iPhone 14 and iPhone 15 are starting to follow the same pattern. Other reporting, based on Cashify’s 2025 user behaviour survey, suggests iPhones captured nearly 63% of sales, underlining how firmly Apple has established itself in India’s second-hand handset market.
The shift is being reinforced by stronger demand for newer phones in the resale channel. Cashify says mobile buybacks increased 29% year on year, and the average buyback value rose 34% to ₹8,573. The share of 5G devices sold to Cashify climbed from 5% in 2022 to more than 54% in 2025, showing that older, lower-value handsets are no longer the dominant supply in the refurbished market.
The trend is also extending beyond phones. Laptops, tablets, smartwatches and other categories made up 16.7% of refurbished sales, up from 8% in 2024. Cashify says seven in 10 Indians still keep two to three unused phones at home, suggesting a large pool of dormant devices that could be recirculated through trade-ins, IMEI verification, certified buybacks and warranty-backed resale. That matters for India as it seeks to build a larger refurbishment industry: the country has more than 300 mobile manufacturing units, exported mobile phones worth ₹2 lakh crore in FY2024-25, and generated more than 14 lakh metric tonnes of e-waste in FY2025-26, of which over 9.79 lakh metric tonnes were recycled. The report argues that longer device lifecycles could support a broader repair-and-refurbishment ecosystem, including the government’s Electronics Repair Services Outsourcing pilot in which Lenovo and Flex tested repairs on imported electronics for re-export.
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