Velory’s analysis found that one step up the phone range cost 35% more per device in 2025, against 6% for switching brand. Employee role decides who gets that step: developers took a Pro model in 49% of orders, sales in 19%.
As hardware prices rise through 2026, new analysis from IT lifecycle management company Velory shows where the money in a corporate device order actually sits. The study covers 9,974 devices across 138 companies in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland during 2025.
The analysis groups employees into five job profiles. The spread between them was widest on the premium tier and narrowest on brand, with every profile running an Apple majority.
At the same time, storage choices barely varied between platforms. Two thirds of corporate phones in the dataset used 128 GB of storage, including 67% of Apple phones and 64% of Android phones.
For companies planning IT budgets in a higher-cost hardware market, the question is which roles the higher specifications are actually serving.
Different roles, different device choices
The differences between employee profiles extend beyond device tier.
Sales employees had the highest Apple adoption of any job profile, at 83%, while also having the lowest median phone spend at €721. The equivalent median for developers was €852.
Seventy percent of phones used by sales employees had 128 GB of storage. Among developers the figure was 54%.
“Every employee should have the right device for the work they do. When hardware costs rise, knowing where a higher specification adds value and where it does not becomes part of budget planning rather than just procurement", says Johan Lilja, CEO of Velory.
Device specification has a significant impact on hardware spend
The gap between tiers is what makes specification a budget question rather than a procurement detail.
In Sweden the same step up cost 42%, the widest gap in the analysis.
Across hundreds or thousands of employees, deciding which roles need the higher tier is one of the larger controllable lines in a hardware budget.
With hardware costs rising in 2026, those choices carry more weight than they did when the orders were placed.
Timing matters for hardware budget planning
The analysis also found a clear seasonal pattern in corporate computer procurement.
Some 62% of computer orders were placed during the second half of 2025, with August, September and October alone accounting for 38% of annual volume.
Phone purchasing was considerably more evenly distributed, with 49% of orders placed during the first half of the year and 51% during the second.
Timing matters more when prices are moving. Companies that know the age of their fleet and when it comes up for renewal can forecast that demand earlier and build it into the budget.
“Good hardware planning starts before the purchase. Knowing what devices employees will need, when they will need them and what specifications their roles require gives IT and finance teams a much stronger basis for forecasting future spend”, says Johan Lilja.
Mixed mobile environments are common across Nordic companies
The analysis also shows that corporate mobile environments are rarely limited to a single choice of brand.
While 90% of companies operated an Apple-majority phone fleet, only 19% used Apple exclusively.
Two thirds of companies had fleets where Apple represented between 10% and 90% of devices, showing that mixed Apple and Android environments are common across the Nordic companies analysed.
The full 2025's Most Popular Work Devices by Employee Profile is available here.
About the 2025's Most Popular Work Devices by Employee Profile
The analysis covers 9,974 corporate devices, 5,803 phones and 4,171 computers, recorded across 138 companies in Velory’s Nordic customer base during 2025. Of these, 3,530 phones and 734 computers were ordered during the year.
Spend figures are based on devices ordered during 2025, while brand and storage figures are based on the full device fleet. Company-level findings are company-weighted so that each company counts equally regardless of fleet size. Device-level findings, including storage and employee-profile figures, are based on shares of the devices themselves. Prices were converted to euros using the European Central Bank’s 2025 annual average reference rates.
About Velory
Velory is the engine that runs IT lifecycle management across hardware, software, mobile subscriptions, and AI agents. Supplier-agnostic by design, Velory lets companies work with the suppliers they choose while managing the IT lifecycle in one system. All customer data is processed by EU data processors. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, the company supports companies worldwide. Learn more at velory.com.
