Abstract:
For the current global mobile phone market, the continuous irrational surge in memory chip prices has directly dragged the industry that was originally in the stock game stage into a rapid decline channel, and the development trend of the entire industry has taken an unexpected sharp turn.
The latest industry report from market research firm IDC shows that global smartphone shipments are expected to be only slightly more than 1 billion units in 2026, a year-on-year decline of 16.7%. This decline further expanded by 2.8 percentage points from the 13.9% forecast in the previous quarter, and will also set the largest annual decline in history since the birth of the smartphone industry.
At present, the purchase cost of NAND flash memory and DRAM memory has increased by more than 300% year-on-year. The increase is far beyond the reasonable range that major mobile phone manufacturers can digest internally. The material cost pressure of many manufacturers has reached an unbearable critical point.
IDC also predicted in the report that the price increase cycle of memory chips will continue until at least 2028. All mainstream mobile phone manufacturers will be forced to adapt to a new industry structure in which the cost of core components will remain high for a long time. In the past, the marketing strategy of stacking large storage to achieve high cost performance that was generally popular in the industry will be difficult to implement on a large scale in the future.
Directly driven by the skyrocketing price of memory chips, the current average selling price of smartphones worldwide has been abruptly raised to a level close to 4,000 yuan. This is a direct result of almost all mainstream mobile phone manufacturers increasing their terminal selling prices in multiple rounds.
Now that the entire industry has formed a clear transmission chain, more and more manufacturers are choosing to pass on the rising component costs directly to ordinary consumers. This has also caused the overall price increase in the mobile phone terminal market this year to far exceed all previous predictions given by industry analysts. The already weak consumer demand for replacement phones has been further suppressed by high prices.
The shock wave of storage price increases that the entire industry has encountered this time is essentially directly related to the monopoly operations of the world's major storage giants that collectively controlled production and guaranteed prices. For a long time to come, it is basically impossible for ordinary consumers to replicate the cost-effective bonus period of previous years when machines with 1,000 yuan equipped with 256G and flagship machines came with 1TB of large storage as standard. The entry threshold for consumption in the entire smartphone market has been permanently raised by this wave of price increases.
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