On September 1, Huawei, Xiaomi and Honor simultaneously raised prices on multiple phones already on sale, with increases ranging from RMB 200 to RMB 1,000 — breaking the industry convention of discounting older models ahead of new launches. Huawei's Mate 80 series rose by RMB 800 to RMB 1,000 across the line, lifting the 16GB/1TB flagship from RMB 8,999 to RMB 9,999. Xiaomi added RMB 300 to its Mi 17 series less than a month after its August 2 increase, and Honor raised the Magic 8 lineup by RMB 300 to RMB 500, bringing prices to RMB 4,799–5,999.
The direct driver of terminal-side price hikes is the structural imbalance in global memory supply and demand. According to TrendForce, memory prices have accumulated a 5- to 7-fold increase since the beginning of 2025; the procurement cost of a 12GB+256GB memory module has risen from around RMB 500 to around RMB 2,200, an increase of over 340%. On the supply side, original manufacturers such as Samsung and SK hynix have allocated more than 70% of their capacity to HBM for AI servers, significantly squeezing DRAM and NAND supply for smartphones. In flagship devices, the bill-of-materials cost of DRAM has now surpassed that of the SoC, with memory climbing from 10%–15% to 30%–40% of overall BOM cost. Price transmission has been equally rapid: by the end of H1 2026, average contract prices for smartphone memory had risen over 200% compared with the end of 2025, and Omdia forecasts global smartphone shipments to decline by approximately 7% year-on-year in 2026.
For the domestic electronic components supply chain, the memory crunch is forcing phone makers to restructure their non-memory BOM. To defend gross margins, vendors will accelerate alternative sourcing and price negotiations on MEMS microphones, PMICs, MLCCs and other in-device components while passing through costs through repeated, smaller retail increases. The reversal of consumers' "wait for a discount" expectations lengthens replacement cycles and pushes component cost pressure into adjacent AIoT categories such as TWS earbuds and smart-home devices. For domestic component lines — Goertek's MEMS acoustic devices, Winsemi Semiconductor and JoulWatt power-management chips, and Wcheon Electronics' MLCCs — supply stability and substitution windows are opening in parallel; the speed with which downstream solution providers and distributors deliver quotes within 12 hours, dynamic inventory alerts and cost optimization will become the decisive variable in this round of BOM renegotiation.