The UK’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has awarded reseller XMA a contract to provide 11,000 iPhone SEs and is apparently paying slightly less than the normal consumer price for asset-tagged devices.
The department agreed a price of £4,181,628 (approximately US$5.7 million) for 11,000 mobile devices, £380 (US$525) each. According to a document published with the contract award notice, these will be iPhone SE 2020s with 64GB of memory, which the UK Apple store sells for £399 (US$551).
However, as part of the deal DWP’s devices will be supplied with waterproof and tamper-evident asset tags holding bar codes and numbers, with XMA providing the details of the tag number, IMEI identifier and serial number of each phone issued.