rewrite this title Forecasting mobile pricing with Mobile Insights: a Q&A with Sean Cleland

B-Stock recently launched its Mobile Insights tool, a first-to-market offering that provides our wireless customers — which include top OEMs, wireless retailers, and buyback companies — on-demand visibility into current and future pricing trends across makes and models to better inform how and when devices should enter the secondary market, and their anticipated performance. 

To learn more about Mobile Insights, why it’s a game changer for the mobile secondary market, and where the market is headed in general, we sat down with B-Stock’s VP of Mobile, Sean Cleland. 

Can you provide some background on why and how Mobile Insights was brought to market?

As far back as I can remember we have given our customers data and insights about how they are doing when it comes to selling their inventory into the secondary market. In particular, we’d look at a specific phone for that customer and what pricing it was getting on the B-Stock platform and then be able to compare that to broader secondary market B2B pricing. 

As things evolved, our customers started applying more standardized grading and refurbishment practices to their trade-in devices. This allowed us to do really good comparisons for them, versus the market. So, looking backward, this data and product has really been evolving ever since we’ve started.

And then with AI and machine learning tools becoming so advanced and easy to access, about two years ago, we thought hey, we should take all this historical market data and then leverage AI and machine learning to start looking forward.

So, because this type of technology was so accessible and we had such a strong historical data set. We said, all right, let’s start using this data to make market predictions and see how good it can be.

And it was very, very good. So we felt extremely confident and launched a beta version of our Mobile Insights last year with our customers.

Why is this a game changer for our customers?

The game changer is the accuracy. Historically our customers have used very simple, manual models to try and set their trade-in values or predict what something is going to sell for in the secondary market to determine insurance deductibles. For example, they might say “we think this model is going to lose 1% a week” and then go set expectations with their finance team.

So Mobile Insights is a game changer because now you’re leveraging sophisticated data models and predictive sets to more confidently determine what a device is going to sell for in eight, nine, or even 16 weeks. The game changer here is that now you have more accurate and actionable data. 

It’s also relevant to call out that Mobile Insights allows our customers to look at the B-Stock data set, in aggregate, across our platform. So they have visibility into how the broader market is performing.

What’s been the initial feedback from our customers?

The initial feedback from customers is “this is great, please give us more data across more models” which is a good sign. We launched Mobile Insights with data on 50 device models sold on the B-Stock platform (across different brands and conditions). Now, with all our mobile customers really leveraging the tool and data, we’re being asked how quickly we can expand this into more categories like watches, tablets, and other wearables. 

And is that something that’s on our roadmap?

Yes, it is. Over the next year we’ll continue to add more phones, conditions, more depreciation analysis to the model. From there we’ll then start expanding into adjacent categories like tablets, wearables, and hearables.

Due to the availability of this kind of predictive data do you foresee more devices moving through B2B sales channels? 

Yes, presumably it will help any company that has inventory in these categories make more informed disposition decisions. Even those that are selling primarily to consumers today. For example, a company might look at the B2B market data and realize the price that could be achieved in B2B versus direct to consumer is so close. So, why even go direct-to-consumer? 

Keep in mind, the incurred costs to sell back into the consumer market are pretty high so we’re already seeing a shift in that more OEMs and carriers are moving more devices through B2B channels.

Shifting gears a bit, we’re seeing more analysts covering the used smartphone market – Circana just released a report and IDC covers it regularly. Why the interest? 

From the analyst side, there’s interest because more and more companies are embracing refurbishment, selling pre-owned phones, and building these certified renewed programs. So there’s a demand out there from really everybody – the OEMs, the carriers, the processors, the insurance companies, you name it – to better understand what’s going on in the broader market. 

So I think this has piqued the analysts interest to really start covering the industry because it’s big enough now.

Where do you see the used smartphone market going? Right now it’s growing faster than the primary. Do you anticipate this continuing and why? 

I do anticipate it continuing. The market is becoming more sophisticated and the tools to get pre-owned products into the market are getting better. And with companies embracing trade-in and leasing programs they are investing in better processing and grading efforts.

So as a consumer I now have a choice: I can get a pre-owned device that’s only a year or two or three years old, but it’s still going to be totally fine and completely functional. So because consumer trust has gone up and that really floats all boats when the demand is strong at the consumer level.

Because consumer trust is high and the sophistication and the processing is getting very, very good, this pre-owned market will continue to grow. It’ll be cannibalistic to the new market even.

We recently released an infographic following the journey of a smartphone – from manufacturing through end of life/recycling. The mobile industry is really on the forefront of promoting reuse and supporting a more circular economy – why do you think this is the case? 

I think mobile is at the forefront of this trend because everybody has a phone; it’s something that we rely on and use every day. And phones are very expensive! So when you have something that is high dollar and that everybody wants and needs, you want to be able to maximize the supply chain and get those devices back out to consumers. 

On the sustainability and compliance front, you have to figure out how to reuse them and prolong the lifecycle. As a retailer or OEM you can’t just destroy or throw away old phones. We don’t want consumers doing that either. So, companies have had to figure out how to not only reuse devices but also incentivize consumers to trade-in and upgrade their phones. The business model has to embrace reuse. 

Any last thoughts on the market and B-Stock’s role in the resale process? 

B stock holds such a unique position in the mobile secondary market because we work with so many different retailers, OEMs and carriers across multiple geographies. And all these companies use different processors, different robotics, different triage processes, etc. And who we sell this pre-owned inventory to is so incredibly broad.

This enables an incomparable view and perspective of the broad, end-to-end used market, as well as unmatched data and insights. 

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Mobile Insights is available exclusively for sellers on the B-Stock platform. To learn more about the tool, our platform, and how you can leverage data to inform your B2B resale strategy, please request a demo.