Samsung plans to sell refurbished Galaxy Note 7s

Tech giant Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said on Monday it plans to sell refurbished versions of the Galaxy Note 7 smartphones that were pulled from markets due to fire-prone batteries.

Samsung said in a statement it will determine in which markets it will sell the refurbished Note 7s after discussions with relevant regulatory authorities and carriers. The near-$900 phones were scrapped about two months after their launch in one of the biggest product safety failures in tech history.



The company also plans to recover and use or sell reusable components such as chips and camera modules and extract rare metals used in Note 7s such as copper, gold, nickel and silver.

Samsung’s flagship Note 7 device met a devastating fate last year after the smartphone literally went up in flames, suffering from faulty lithium-ion batteries. The South Korean manufacturer subsequently issued a global recall recovering some 2.5 million handsets sold worldwide.



The smartphone maker then ran a rigorous investigation into the issue which revealed deflected electrodes at the top corners of the battery to have caused it to overheat and go up in flames.

Some 200,000 devices were destroyed in the investigation. However, the smartphone manufacture is still left with a huge number of unwanted Note 7s.