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The cost of doing nothing
Nobody signs off an invoice for carrying cost, which is exactly why it survives budget reviews. It is absorbed into overhead, spread across departments, and never attributed to the parts causing it.
Around year 2.5 the accumulated carrying cost passes what the stock is still worth on the market
On €1 million of genuinely idle MRO stock, the carrying cost alone runs to roughly €250,000 a year. That is before accounting for the market value the parts themselves are losing as newer generations launch and demand moves on.
The two effects compound. A part held five years is not just five years of storage cost – it is also a part that has slipped down the lifecycle curve toward obsolete, where the buyer pool shrinks and the recoverable share falls with it.
The practical consequence: the best financial outcome from surplus is rarely the highest price. It is the highest price achievable soon enough. A route that recovers 20% this quarter can beat one that recovers 45% three years from now, once holding cost is charged against the wait.
Step zero
Selling a part externally while a sister plant buys the same part externally is the most expensive possible outcome for the group. So the first pass over your idle stock is not a valuation – it is a redeployment check across your own sites.
That check runs on the Golden Record data layer, which is what makes one site's surplus readable as another site's requirement. Whatever survives that pass is genuine surplus, and that is what this page is about. If you have not run the internal check yet, start there – it is the higher-value move, and it costs nothing to establish.
Three surplus recovery routes
The three models differ in one dimension that matters: how much you recover versus how long it takes and how much of your attention it consumes. There is no universally correct answer – there is a correct answer for your situation.
We buy the lot outright. You get a single transparent valuation, we arrange transport and pickup, and the stock leaves your site.
You are closing a line, moving warehouses, or need the floor space and the cash this quarter.
Your stock is listed on the Automa.Net marketplace under your control. We help with pricing, shipping and content enrichment; you keep the commercial decisions.
You have internal capacity, want to keep control of pricing, or need to sell without revealing your company identity.
We take physical custody and run the whole commercial process – storage, listing, pricing, marketing, buyer enquiries and global delivery – while you retain ownership until each part sells.
Recovery value matters more than speed, and the stock is good enough to reward patience.
Before you commit, we quote the outright purchase price and estimate what the fulfilment route would generate in year 1 and across years 2–5. Three numbers, same stock, so the trade-off is explicit rather than argued. Most groups end up splitting the lot – fast-moving categories to fulfilment, dead weight to outright purchase.
How we arrive at a number
Surplus valuation is where this industry earns its reputation, deservedly or not. These are the inputs, so you can check the logic against parts you already know the value of.
New in box, opened, used, or untested. The single biggest swing factor.
Original packaging and documentation materially widen the buyer pool.
Where the part sits on its lifecycle curve, and how long the buyer pool will last.
What comparable units are actually trading for right now, from platform data.
Two of the three routes, three numbers, one dataset. The comparison is the deliverable.
Live offers across a network of verified suppliers, not a historical price book.
Valuations draw on the same platform data that powers our price intelligence work – live offers, not a historical price book. It matters more on the sell side than the buy side: a valuation built on three-year-old list prices is wrong in both directions, and you only notice on the parts where it was wrong in yours.
It also means we are pricing against demand we can observe, including which obsolete categories currently have buyers actively searching.
Risk & liability
A common blocker on surplus programmes is legal, not commercial: nobody wants the group carrying warranty exposure on a component it sold to a stranger four years ago.
Circular economy
Asset reuse is one of the few sustainability levers that improves the P&L instead of costing against it – and it is measurable. Recovery activity is reported as avoided carbon emissions through reuse, in a form that maps onto group circular-economy and emission-reduction targets.
Practically, this turns a warehouse clear-out into something the ESG report can cite, which is often what unlocks the internal approval that pure cost recovery could not.
Before you send a list
Not every pallet has a recovery story. Knowing which is which up front saves a valuation cycle.
Low-value commodity items in small quantities can cost more to photograph, list and ship than they will ever return. We will say so rather than quietly bundling them into a number.
The 3–20% range is not a negotiating position. It reflects that we take on the holding cost, the market risk and the time – which is exactly what you are paying to transfer.
The year 1 and year 2–5 figures are estimates built from observed demand. Demand for a specific obsolete category can move, and if it moves against you the recovery will be lower.
If your own group needs the part, recovering 50% externally is a worse outcome than avoiding a 100% purchase internally. We will point that out even though it removes the item from our scope.
Send a list of the surplus stock sitting idle. You will get an outright purchase price and a fulfilment revenue projection for year 1 and years 2–5 – so the speed-versus-yield decision is made with figures rather than instinct.
