Dive Brief:
- Partners are eying the market for refurbished IT equipment as chip shortages drive up device prices, according to an Omdia report published last week. The situation favors providers with IT asset disposition pipelines, either through internal refurbishing practices or third-party ITAD specialists, the analyst firm said.
- More than half of channel organizations expect severe shortages across most product lines during Q2, and another 20% anticipate some supply gaps, Omdia found. The firm, a Channel Dive sister company, surveyed 257 partners in its Candefero channel community.
- Second-hand sourcing is gaining vendor support and channel traction, Omdia Senior Analyst Ben Caddy told Channel Dive. “Vendors are exploring new ways to partner with their channel partners and distributors to grow the scale and availability of refurbished hardware,” Caddy said, pointing to HP’s Certified Refurbished partner licensing program and a similar move, the longstanding Cisco Refresh Certified Remanufactured sales program, which is also open to partners.
Dive Insight:
As server, storage and device scarcities take hold, key vendors are passing on cost increases to partners.
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins reassured investors earlier this month that the company had raised prices to account for increased component costs and was revising the terms of some partner contracts to make up the difference. “We’ll continue to monitor market trends and make additional adjustments as necessary,” he added, speaking during Cisco’s Q2 2026 earnings call.
Early signs of common chip shortages triggered by massive hyperscaler consumption of high-capacity processors and other hardware to build out AI data centers surfaced during the final months of 2025.
Storage and memory chips, including dynamic random access memory semiconductors, were particularly hard hit, Dell COO Jeff Clarke noted in November, during the PC maker’s Q3 2026 earnings call.
“The cost basis is going up across all products,” Clarke said. “Everything that uses a CPU has DRAM, has storage in it,” adding that the company would adjust product pricing as needed.
Memory costs were adding 15% to 18% to the cost of a typical PC in November, HP executive Enrique Lores, who stepped down as CEO of the company earlier this month, said during a November earnings call. In December, IDC warned that “a potentially permanent, strategic reallocation of the world’s silicon wafer capacity” would bump up prices and take a toll on PC and smartphone shipments heading into the new year.
“We are absolutely seeing major price rises for many of the key vendors amid these shortages, which are primarily fueled by hyperscalers buying up much of the available memory supply,” Caddy said.
The industry has responded by ramping up existing refurbishment efforts and building stronger quality controls around the process. Channel partners, in turn, can pivot to ITAD to make up for new product shortfalls and provide clients with lower cost alternatives.
“We're seeing a lot of the major channel focused vendors — HP, HPE, Lenovo, Cisco — focus on certified refurbish, which is a device that’s pretty much as good as new, and they put their green label to say that they stand by it,” said Caddy.
Partners are helping to drive the shift, particularly in Europe, where refurbished hardware practices are more mature than their U.S. counterparts. Computacenter, Dustin and Atea are three channel organizations that have robust hardware takeback programs, according to Omdia. Distributor TD Synnex has carried Cisco Refresh products in Europe since 2024 and now offers HP Certified Refurbished PC.
“Vendors realize that the secondary market is maturing and they need to be involved in it because their partners are there already,” Caddy said. “They’re looking at this as an ecosystem model where you work with companies that have legitimate refurbishing capabilities as a way to get your products out at scale in a way that you couldn't necessarily do on your own as a vendor.”
