The Take-Back Goldmine: How Mid-Size Companies Can Out-Hustle the Giants on Circular Profit
You’re an agile company specializing in durable B2B products, from industrial machinery to complex medical equipment. Your largest competitors, the corporate giants, are talking about sustainability. But here is the secret the data confirms: They are leaving your biggest profit opportunity on the table.
The Circularity Index 2026, which analyzed the largest German firms, reveals that these companies are stuck. Nearly half of them have no concrete, measurable circularity goals, choosing instead to focus on easy metrics like renewable energy.
More critically, they are systematically avoiding the strategies that require real business model change, the strategies that generate new revenue.
This is your moment to gain a decisive competitive edge.
Most companies throw away their highest-margin opportunity
In the circular economy, value is retained by keeping products and components in use for as long as possible. The highest-value strategies are Refurbish and Remanufacture (Value Retention).
The Index’s key finding for your sector: Not a single large corporation has set a concrete quantitative goal for Refurbish or Remanufacture strategies. This massive gap is where agile mid-size companies can swoop in and secure three immediate, tangible outcomes:
1. Secure Higher Margins than New Sales
When you implement a formal B2B take-back program, you stop throwing away residual product value. You reclaim your assets and convert them into a premium, certified pre-owned product line.
- Financial Outcome: You avoid the high and volatile costs of purchasing virgin raw materials and manufacturing primary components from scratch. Instead, you invest a fraction of that cost in labor for inspection, repair, and certification. This allows you to resell an “as-new” product to a different segment (e.g., price-sensitive clients or emerging markets), securing higher gross margins than selling scrap and often competing favorably with new sales.
- Resilience Outcome: By relying on your own reclaimed components, you reduce dependence on volatile global supply chains for virgin materials, making you “more resilient to crises and price fluctuations”.
2. Build Unbreakable Customer Loyalty & Recurring Service Revenue
In the B2B world, the product is a platform for service. A formal take-back program is the ultimate loyalty mechanism.
- Relationship Outcome: By offering to manage the end-of-life process for your client’s equipment, you convert a single transaction into a continuous relationship. This ensures your high-value assets don’t exit your value chain and binds your customers to your brand for their next upgrade cycle.
- Revenue Outcome: The core of this model is the service component: repair, maintenance, and diagnostics. These are high-margin service revenue streams that are stable, predictable, and independent of new product sales, proven to increase overall company revenues.
3. Proof of Concept: Pioneers are Already Winning
While the majority of DAX 40 are still setting vague qualitative goals, a few industrial leaders provide a clear blueprint for success in the B2B space:
- Siemens Healthineers: Demonstrates a strong Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) program with integrated take-back, repair, refurbish, and reuse operations for their complex medical equipment.
- Deutsche Telekom: Operates successful dual B2B and B2C systems with a multi-faceted approach, including repair, buy-back, and refurbishment programs for telecommunication devices.
- GuideU from Lufthansa Technik: This initiative focuses on taking full lifecycle responsibility for components, going beyond the traditional cradle-to-gate approach. By establishing dedicated collection containers at international customer locations (Sofia, Malta, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines), they are not just collecting end-of-use materials, they are analyzing process dynamics and stakeholder adoption to gain valuable insights for building future, more efficient and profitable reclaim systems.
Want to explore how take-back and refurbishment could work in your business?
The Circularity Index 2026 shows that the corporate giants are missing the biggest opportunity in modern business. Your mid-size agility is your competitive superpower.
Stop focusing on basic recycling (the lowest-value strategy ). Start capturing the lucrative residual value of your products with a professionally structured B2B take-back program.
Book your 30-minute Circular Strategy Deep-Dive. Let’s design your high-margin Refurbishment program for measurable ROI in the next 12 months.
Larissa Scherrer
Marketing Strategy
Brand Positioning
Social Media Strategy
