Media365
Thanks to tighter budgets and a growing taste for retro tech, Chinese millennials and Gen Z consumers – who once chased the latest iPhone or Android handset – are increasingly turning to second-hand markets for upgrades or bargains.
“Consumers on tighter budgets no longer consider buying used items a shameful thing,” said Rex Chen, president and chief financial officer at ATRenew, China’s largest second-hand electronics recycler and trading platform operator.
With most the platform’s users born in the 1990s, the Nasdaq-listed company is positioning itself to capture more growth in China’s still underdeveloped resale market, even as the fight for customers pushes up marketing costs.
Chen said the shift was expanding what young consumers were willing to resell, from ageing smartphones to gold and jewellery. ATRenew was scaling up its services to capture more of that trade-in traffic.
Only between 4 to 5 per cent of consumer electronics in circulation are currently traded on the mainland’s secondary market, leaving plenty of room for growth as policymakers push consumption and consumers become more comfortable with buying and selling used devices.
ATRenew, which held a 9.1 per cent market share in 2023, is betting that subsidies and changing attitudes will help it capture a bigger slice of that expanding pie.
