Why is today the best time to sell your Samsung Galaxy S9?

If you’re thinking of trading in your Samsung Galaxy S9, you want to get a move on. Samsung is due to release the Galaxy S10 tomorrow (20th February 2019 for those reading in the future – has Brexit finished yet?) and you can expect the price you might fetch for a second-hand S9 to fall off a cliff.

“Announcements and new releases have the biggest impact on phone depreciation,” according to MusicMagpie, a site that started off buying second-hand CDs and DVDs, and has since migrated in tech. “In the weeks following the release of a new handset, you can expect to see the value of older models drop considerably.”

How much does the second-hand value drop? MusicMagpie has a neat feature on its website that allows you to punch in the name of your phone and see how its value depreciates over time.

You can see from the chart for the Samsung Galaxy S8 that the value of the handset tumbles sharply around the phone’s first birthday, when the successor is invariably unveiled.

In the run-up to the announcement, you can expect to get to half the value of the phone back. After the announcement, the phone loses 65% of its value. That equates to around £100 for a top-end smartphone.

The Galaxy S9 has been subject to heavy discounting in recent months, meaning the second-hand value of that handset has already taken a knock, as you can see from this graph.

The phone has already lost 65% of its original value and the announcement of its successor is likely to plunge that below the 70% mark.

So, if you’re one of those people who absolutely must have the latest handset and you’re prepared to gamble that the S10 won’t be a dog (it’s a pretty safe bet), then you might want to get that trade-in agreed today.

Bear in mind, of course, that even though Samsung will announce the S10 tomorrow, it likely won’t be available for a few weeks. So make sure you’ve got an old handset to fall back on for a period.

Of course, you could just keep your phone. It’s better for your pocket and the environment, and the new one probably won’t be that much better anyway…

Now read this: How do you restore data from a backup on Samsung Galaxy phone?