Brace yourself: Xiaomi warns of a ‘sizeable rise’ in smartphone prices next year

• Xiaomi's president has warned that smartphone prices could increase a lot
• This is due to the rising cost of memory chips
• Memory pricing would affect all phone brands, not just Xiaomi

If you thought smartphones were expensive now, you could be in for a shock next year, as according to Xiaomi President Lu Weibing, their prices could be in for a “sizeable rise.”

This claim was made during an earnings conference call (via Reuters), with the rising cost of memory chips being the reason given.

You see, memory chips are in high demand right now, as they’re used in artificial intelligence servers, so prices for memory chips are soaring, and that will also affect the price of the memory used in phones.

Since this claim of smartphone price rises comes from the president of Xiaomi, we can be almost certain that Xiaomi’s upcoming phones will cost more than they might have otherwise – so for example next year’s Xiaomi 18 series could be extremely expensive.

A problem for everyone

But this issue isn’t one that only Xiaomi will be facing – the whole industry will have to address rising memory prices, which will presumably mean either higher smartphone pricing or lower profits for the companies if they don’t pass the costs onto consumers.

Since most companies aren’t known to be fans of sacrificing profits, we’d assume that in most cases there probably will be price rises. That means big-name handsets like the Samsung Galaxy S26 series and the iPhone 18 line might also cost more than their predecessors.

Indeed, South Korean publication Chosun recently reported that a price increase for the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra was expected. Though interestingly News Pim has claimed that the base model Galaxy S26 won’t have a price rise – but that this will be achieved by reversing course on some planned upgrades. So that’s another possibility – that we’ll see smaller upgrades than usual next year in order to keep prices at current levels.

Neither of those options sound great, so for now we’d suggest you get saving if you were planning to upgrade your phone next year – or hold out a little longer and hope memory chip pricing eventually drops again.

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