Cascade described a year of relative stability and continued return to normalcy in the IT asset disposition market. | Courtesy of Cascade Asset Management
An annual industry overview from Cascade Asset Management found resale values have largely returned to pre-pandemic levels, and a majority of surveyed IT asset managers plan to maintain or ramp up technology spending in the coming year. That suggests plenty of incoming ITAD demand.
The 2025 ITAD Benchmarking Report from longtime ITAD operator Cascade puts numbers behind what many ITAD firms observed throughout 2024, a year that brought positive market forces and relative calm. Neil Peters-Michaud, co-founder and CEO of Cascade, wrote that it was a “great relief” to report the 2024 trends after the industry turbulence of the prior years.
“After four years of struggling with changing workforce needs, wild swings in secondary market prices for refurbished equipment, and a bout of 9%-plus inflation, we are seeing business trends stabilize,” Peters-Michaud wrote.
This is the 11th year Madison, Wisconsin-headquartered Cascade has published its insights from a survey of IT asset management professionals at Cascade client companies. This year, the survey included responses from 55 enterprises and organizations in industries including health care, financial services, government agencies, insurance and manufacturing.
In an interview with E-Scrap News, Peters-Michaud expanded on some of the trends and described where some could be headed in the year to come.
Resale prices climb back to 2019 territory
Used device values had a wild ride during the COVID years, spiking in the early part of the pandemic as supply chain disruptions meant sudden demand for used devices, then plummeting in 2022 and 2023.
Inflation, which rose markedly throughout 2022, increased the cost to procure and ship devices, Peters-Michaud said, and that cut into prices. The supply chains for new devices also opened back up, making used devices less competitive than they had been. And the inflation and interest rate environment were macroeconomic trends that led some businesses to delay office refreshes, meaning there was less good-quality equipment being retired and available for resale.
“All of those three things have corrected since then,” Peters-Michaud said.
Last year, Cascade’s report offered evidence that prices were beginning to rebound and near 2019 levels, and the latest report confirms that trend.
“Average resale values for all refurbished devices sold at Cascade grew by 14.4% since the pre-pandemic days of 2019,” Cascade reported. “That represents an average annual growth rate of 2.7% over the past 5 years, which is a return to a normal growth rate, despite all the price swings of the intervening years.”
Besides the beneficial trends that Peters-Michaud noted, Cascade pointed to a lower average age of retired devices as a significant contributor to price growth. The average age of resold desktops dropped from 4.7 to 4.6 years, and the age of laptops dropped from 4.3 to 4.1 years.
“We expect average refurbished computer resale values to continue to grow at a modest pace in 2025 as more companies indicate an increased investment in new IT equipment and as the demand for Windows 11 capable devices, with a minimum Gen 8 processor, will kick into high gear by the end of 2025,” Cascade reported.
Other takeaways from the report include:
- Nearly half of respondents said they anticipate maintaining the same level of IT spending in 2025, and an additional 31% say they’ll increase spending this year. That suggests plenty of demand for ITAD services, and plenty of used equipment for remarketing.
- Security-locked devices are getting harder to unlock. Cascade reported it regularly works with customers to remove security controls, like activation locks, from retired devices to maximize resale value. In fact, Cascade reported processing 25,800 security-locked devices from 2022 through 2024, and that it was able to successfully unlock 67% of them. That’s down from being able to unlock 75% during the prior three-year period, the company noted.
- Environmental, social and governance reporting initiatives saw a spike in interest from clients, with 34% responding it was “important” to them, up from 19% the prior year, although the percentage describing it as “very important” declined slightly. Still, the number of clients producing public ESG reports grew from 16% to 23%.