Planning To Buy A Phone? Buy One Now Or Be Ready To Pay More From Next Year: Here Is Why

Upgrading your phone is going to get more difficult in the coming days, which is why all readers are suggested to do so as soon as they can. Not fear mongering, but we have already witnessed the trend of brands like Apple, OnePlus, and iQOO hiking the price of their flagship models as compared to their last year's counterparts. And now, the basic phones are also going to get costlier in the coming months. As shared in a research from Counterproint, the aggressive demand of chips in building humongous infrastructure is most likely causing a shortage that will affect regular smartphone users. As data centres take up a lot of critical components at a fast speed and smartphone producers are at the suffering end with production costs rising. Now,

both modern smartphones and advanced AI servers are heavily dependent on the same type of memory chips, specifically DRAM. These processors are necessary for managing complex tasks. And a more beneficial deal for manufacturers is to sell the chips to AI data centres. Because of that, the manufacturers are prioritising the high-margin customers, due to which the prices are soaring for the chips being used in consumer-centric items.

What The Future Holds?

According to the Counterpoint research, the scenario is going to become worse in 2026. The prices of chips users in phones could get a hike of at least 40 percent in the first half of 2026, which will ultimately increase the cost of phones, affecting the buyers. Furthermore, the most affected category will be budget smartphones as the production cost is expected to take a jump of around 20 to 30 percent. The research also suggests that due to these price hikes, the global smartphone shipments will sink by 2.1 percent in 2026. Counterpoint research says that the prices of smartphones will rise by around 6.9 per cent in 2026. There are chances that brands like Apple and Samsung will not let their product lines go through a high impact of these price hikes. Apart from that, we can expect to see price hikes in the case of phones by Xiaomi, Realme, Oppo, And more.