[wongarsu]

If the university didn't make phone repairs themselves they would have to send the phones off for repair, or contract with a local phone repair shop. Or the secret third option: telling your employees to get it fixed and send you the invoice. None of them are cheap, and some of them will make you very annoyed with your billing/procurement/finance people. After a certain scale doing it inhouse makes sense, and with the right phone it's not much more difficult than fixing a business laptop, which is also commonly done inhouse with available spare parts

[retired]

Dutch wages are high though. Especially at scale it could make sense to bundle all broken phones in one big box, ship it off to a low-wage country and then ship the phones back after refurbishment.

7500 employees, 7500 phones. If they all need one repair every other year that is nearly 20 repairs a day. That is a full-time job, which in The Netherlands has an employment cost of around €75,000 a year (including a place to work, pension, benefits). I bet someone in Romania could do it for half the cost. Shipping 100 phones in a box every week isn't that expensive.