For six years, Ana Beaulne ran ReFix Bench, a phone and laptop repair counter tucked between a shoe store and a food court in the Corva Mall, using parts sourced secondhand or salvaged from broken devices because manufacturers would not sell components directly to independent shops.
That changed in January, when a regional rule requiring major manufacturers to sell repair parts to any registered shop took effect. Beaulne registered on the first day applications opened.
“Before this, a cracked screen meant I was hunting a salvage supplier and hoping the part matched,” she said. “Now I order it from the manufacturer’s own parts portal, same as an authorised shop would.”
The change has not been frictionless. Beaulne says wait times for some components still run two to three weeks, longer than the same-day availability manufacturers advertise for their own authorised service centres, and pricing on certain parts, particularly camera modules, remains high enough that some repairs are barely worth doing.
“They complied with the rule,” she said. “They didn’t necessarily make it easy.”
Still, her repair completion rate has risen from around 70 percent of jobs a year ago to closer to 90 percent now, a change she attributes almost entirely to reliable parts access rather than any shift in her own skill or pricing.
The regional standards board says it is monitoring manufacturer pricing and lead times for signs of compliance in name only, and has scheduled a review of the rule’s first year for early next year. Beaulne, for now, keeps a running list of parts still worth the wait.
