Sourcing mobile phone repair parts from China

Duty is the small number here

Repair parts sit in tariff headings that the UK mostly charges nothing on, which surprises people who assume electronics are expensive to import. Read from the UK Trade Tariff on 21 September 2026, display modules and parts of telephones are free of duty, and lithium-ion cells attract 2%. None of these codes carried an anti-dumping measure against China.

That changes where you should spend your attention. On most imports the tariff is the number that decides whether an order works; here it barely moves the landed cost, and import VAT is recoverable if you are VAT-registered. What can destroy the economics of a consignment is a detention at the border, and that has nothing to do with duty. Our duty calculator still gives you the landed figure, but on this category it is the easy part.

The logo is the risk, not the quality

Under section 10 of the Trade Marks Act 1994, a person infringes a registered trade mark by using an identical sign in the course of trade on identical goods, and section 10(4) says that importing goods under the sign counts as use. A replacement screen with a manufacturer's logo etched on the flex, or a battery printed with a brand name, or retail packaging carrying one, is therefore a trade mark problem the moment it arrives, however well it works. Quality is not a defence, because the right being infringed is the mark, not the performance.

The scale of the enforcement is not hypothetical. The UK Customs Intellectual Property Enforcement Report 2021 to 2023 records 1,042,886 articles seized across 4,392 procedures in 2023, with 202,799 of them in the mobile phones category, up from 86,865 the year before. It also records that goods from China accounted for the largest share by retail value, £136.2 million in 2023. Rights holders keep a standing request with Border Force through an Application for Action, which lasts a year, and phone brands are among the most active users of it.

So be explicit with the supplier about markings, in writing and on the sample. Ask for parts with no brand logo on the component, no brand logo in the moulding, and plain or own-brand packaging. Describe what you sell by compatibility rather than by borrowing the mark, and take your own advice on how you word it: this guide is a sourcing guide, not legal advice, and the line between referring to a brand and using its mark is one a solicitor should draw for your listings. The IP guide covers the other direction, protecting your own brand in China.

Grading words mean nothing until you define them

Screens are sold with a vocabulary that sounds technical and is not standardised. Soft OLED, hard OLED, incell, aftermarket, original, refurbished, pull: none of these has an agreed definition across suppliers, and two factories quoting the same word are frequently quoting different products at a price gap that explains itself once you know what they meant.

Get the physical description instead of the grade name. Ask what the display panel actually is and who made it, whether the assembly is new or harvested from a used device, what has been replaced if it has been refurbished, and what the touch layer and the backlight are. Then approve a physical sample and keep it as the standard the deliveries are checked against, which is the golden sample principle applied to a part where the visual difference between grades is small and the functional difference is not.

Test the samples in the way your workshop actually uses them, not on a bench. Fit them, run them for a period, and check the things that fail late rather than on arrival: true tone and auto-brightness behaviour, touch response at the edges, the fit of the assembly in the frame, and whether the device reports a non-genuine part. A part that passes on day one and fails in week six costs you a second repair and a customer, which is why sampling before the repeat order is worth more here than on almost anything else.

Batteries make you a producer, and complicate the freight

Importing batteries into the UK makes you a producer for battery producer responsibility. GOV.UK's guidance is that producers placing more than one tonne of portable batteries on the UK market in a year must join a battery compliance scheme, and that distributors selling or supplying more than 32 kg a year must take back waste batteries from customers. Registration is with the environmental regulator, recording the tonnage and chemistry placed on the market each year.

Phone batteries are light, so a repair business can move a great many of them before reaching a tonne. The 32 kg take-back threshold for distributors is the one that catches a workshop first, and it is about what you supply rather than what you import. Check where you sit on both before the orders scale up rather than after.

Freight is the other consequence. Lithium batteries are tightly controlled in the air, with specific packing, labelling and documentation, so a supplier who ships screens by air courier may not be able to ship batteries the same way. Plan the two lines separately, or accept sea freight for the cells. The air and sea comparison sets out the trade-off, and the electronics guide covers the waste electricals obligations that come with the rest of the category.

Buying consistency rather than a price

A repair business does not actually want the cheapest screen; it wants the same screen next month. That is a different purchase, and it is bought differently. The supplier who wins on a spot price is often a trading company buying whatever is cheap that week, which is precisely the behaviour that produces a batch that behaves unlike the last one.

So ask the questions that distinguish the two. Which factory makes the assemblies, and can you have the same source named on every order? What changes when they cannot get that panel — do they substitute, and will they tell you? What is the defect rate they will stand behind, and what happens to the failures you find after fitting? The factory versus trading company guide explains why the answer to the first question changes the answer to the rest.

Put the failure process in the order before the first shipment, because a part that fails after fitting costs you labour as well as the part, and that is not recoverable from a supplier who never agreed to it. Our guide on goods that arrive wrong sets out what your remedy actually depends on, and the short version is that it is decided by who you contract with, before anything ships.