The manufacturers are struggling to provide spare parts that they have the obligation to put into circulation so that smartphones can be repaired. Apple in particular.
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“Spare parts are my biggest concern.” In his small immaculate white repair shop, not far from the Paris ring road, Nadir Bouhania is sorry: “Some are only available within two weeks, customers refuse So always to repair. Others are not available at all. “
Without spare parts, defective smartphones are most often replaced by a new device. In order to avoid this mess, the antigaspillage law for a circular economy (AGEC) was voted in January 2020. The text gave birth a year later to the repairability index, a clearly visible label in store, attributing a bad Note to smartphones whose spare parts are not found. The objective: to encourage manufacturers to improve in particular the availability of the latter. He also led in January 2022 to a firm obligation: the manufacturers must make available repairers A dozen pieces for five years for mobiles marketed since 2022.
for what improvements? “None”, according to Nadir Bouhania. “The availability of parts has not improved for smartphones released in 2022”, Aldric Meneghel, founder of Utopya, a large distributor working mainly with independent repairers. Few are the models of smartphones for which all parts are available to suppliers of the genre. Can, for example, the buttons, the speaker or the back of the back, pieces that are well likely to break. Fortunately, the screen and the battery, the most fragile parts, are more often available. But it is far from systematic, especially when the smartphone has not sold much or it is no longer very young.
Maltis, independents are however a key factor in the difficult equation of the repair of smartphones: they form a mesh of thousands of shops in France. They are conventionally opposed to affiliated repairers like Save and Wefix, which, in a part of their network at least, more easily access the parts thanks to Their partnerships with certain large manufacturers, but whose coverage of the territory is limited to a few hundred shops.
parts not found or very expensive
However, even for them, spare parts are a problem. Contacted, the Wefix company did not wish to answer questions from the world, but Charles Bocquillon, director general of the Save store network, admits difficulties with “young, or smaller brands”, as well as with Oppo.
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