News Reporter |
News Editor | Wen Shuqi
On July 21, NUPIAO learned from the supply chain that Xiaomi has raised its full-year smartphone shipment target for 2026 from about 90 million units to 110 million units—a jump of roughly 16%. The extra volume is mainly coming from budget-friendly models.
A person close to Xiaomi told NUPIAO that this upward revision reflects the company’s belief that the current storage market could be on the verge of a reversal. Earlier this year, Xiaomi had actually cut its shipment targets twice, thanks to ongoing cost hikes for upstream memory chips.
Back in January 2026, NUPIAO exclusively reported that rising storage prices in the upstream supply chain had pushed multiple phone makers—including Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, and Transsion—to cut their annual orders. Xiaomi’s reduction was over 20%. That brought its 2026 target down from an initial 170 million units (matching its 2025 level) to 135 million. Then on June 30, Nikkei Asia, citing insiders, said Xiaomi had further slashed its forecast by about 30% to around 95 million units—more than 40% below the early-year projection.
Industry insiders tell NUPIAO that downstream players like phone makers are now showing clear resistance to the relentless price hikes for storage. OPPO and vivo, for instance, recently rejected Samsung’s third-quarter pricing offer, even though the increase wasn’t as steep as in previous quarters.
The same source added that Xiaomi’s latest move sends a strong signal: storage buyers are no longer willing to foot the bill for ever-rising memory costs. When demand-side tolerance hits a ceiling, the momentum for price hikes may finally start to crack.
Since the second half of 2025, the global storage industry has been in what many call a “super upcycle.” TrendForce data shows that DRAM prices surged 171.8% year-on-year in Q3 2025, and then climbed another 45%–50% in Q4. The trend accelerated in 2026: Q1 DRAM contract prices soared 90%–95% quarter-on-quarter, while NAND Flash jumped 55%–60%—both record single-quarter spikes. Q2 saw DRAM rise another 58%–64% and NAND Flash 54%–75%.
The “Big Three”—Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron—have been shifting massive amounts of advanced production capacity to higher-margin HBM (high-bandwidth memory) and server DRAM, leaving consumer-grade memory in severe shortage. Roughly 70% of global memory capacity now goes to data centers, making phones and PCs the sacrificial lamb in this capacity squeeze.
In April 2026, Samsung officially stopped accepting new orders for LPDDR4-class products; Micron and SK Hynix had already stopped taking orders by late 2025. The “cheap memory” that powers budget phones is disappearing from the market. Industry calculations show that for phones under $200, storage costs now account for over 30% of the BOM (bill of materials), while for high-end models above $800, that figure is less than 10%. Facing the same DRAM price hike, a low-end handset would need a retail price increase of 40%–50% just to maintain margins, whereas a premium device could get away with a 5%–8% bump.
The ripple effects have been brutal. Counterpoint Research lowered its 2026 global smartphone shipment forecast to about 1.08 billion units in early June, widening the expected year-on-year decline from the initial 2.1% to 13.9%—the lowest since 2013. IDC similarly predicts a 13% drop to around 1.1 billion units. TrendForce also revised its forecast from a 0.1% annual growth to a 2% contraction.
But hitting the ceiling on demand tolerance doesn’t mean prices will drop overnight. Multiple industry insiders told NUPIAO that while downstream players are pushing back, the fundamental shortage of memory chips remains hard to change. On one hand, AI data centers are still hungry for more HBM and enterprise storage, so the big three foundries keep diverting advanced capacity to those high-margin areas. On the other hand, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Kioxia are still cutting production of consumer-grade memory to maintain their high-price strategy.
According to Omdia, Samsung Electronics will produce 4.68 million NAND wafers in 2026, down from 4.9 million in 2025. SK Hynix will drop from about 1.9 million to 1.7 million, and Kioxia from 4.8 million to 4.69 million. Meanwhile, capital spending across the Big Three is structurally shifting toward HBM and server DRAM, further squeezing consumer-grade storage capacity.
As of press time, Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo have not responded to the above information.
