Chips and memory are both seeing price hikes! Android manufacturers' sales expectations for the new generation of flagships have plummeted by 50% — the reality is brutal.

Storage chip prices have been surging, and this wave has now propagated through the supply chain to upstream raw material sectors, driving up costs across the board and directly lowering major phone makers' shipment expectations for this year.

According to industry tech bloggers, with procurement costs for core chips and memory continuing to climb, most leading Android manufacturers have set sales targets for their next-gen flagship models at only about 50% of the actual sales of the previous generation. They generally avoid setting overly high shipment goals, fearing that cost pressures could lead to massive inventory losses.

Prior to this, mainstream phone brands both domestically and internationally, including Honor, OPPO, vivo, and Apple, have all reported varying degrees of price adjustments at the retail level. This round of price hikes has now covered nearly all major brands across the industry, with no single manufacturer able to fully offset rising costs through its own scale.

Richard Yu, Chairman of Huawei's Terminal BG, stated candidly in a public interview that phones across nearly all price tiers are likely to see widespread price increases industry-wide. If companies insist on maintaining pricing from a few years ago, virtually every phone maker would be selling at a loss, a model that is entirely unsustainable and cannot last long.

According to market research firm GfK China, the average selling price of domestic phones has climbed from 2,685 yuan in 2019 to 4,000 yuan in 2024, nearly doubling over five years.

Another authoritative research firm, IDC, predicts that the global average selling price of phones in 2026 will rise a further 14% from current levels, making an upward shift in the industry's pricing benchmark an inevitable trend.

The most direct and hard-hitting trigger for this industry-wide price surge is the extreme supply-demand imbalance in the global storage chip market. The core variable that has completely reshaped the original stable structure of the consumer electronics supply chain is the explosive growth of the AI industry worldwide over the past two years.