OPPO officially announces price adjustment! Will Xiaomi raise prices? Lei Jun: Try to reduce the difficulty for consumers to accept!

On March 10, OPPO announced on its official store that some products will have their prices adjusted on March 16. Currently affected products include the OPPO A series, K series, and OnePlus, excluding the OPPO Find series, Reno series, and OPPO Pad series.

The specific announcement is as follows:

As of now, multiple brands including OPPO, OnePlus, vivo, and Xiaomi have stated or already adjusted their prices. For example, after ending a one-month “1 Billion Memory Subsidy,” the REDMI Turbo5’s price increased by 100 yuan starting March 4.

Recently, Lei Jun, attending an important meeting, admitted that due to the surge in AI demand, memory storage prices have skyrocketed, significantly impacting mobile phones and related businesses. When asked if Xiaomi phones will see price increases this year, Lei Jun said, “The cost pressure of memory chips is high. We are trying to offset these costs by improving internal efficiency to reduce the difficulty for consumers to accept higher prices.”

On February 26, Samsung held the Galaxy global new product launch, delivering the first flagship of the year—the Galaxy S26 series. As the first major release in the mobile industry in 2026, Samsung introduced innovations and some sacrifices: new built-in anti-peep screens, only the “top configuration” models with 16GB RAM, more AI features, and a key signal—price increases. The starting price for the standard S26 is 6,999 yuan, the S26+ starts at 7,999 yuan, and the ultra-large S26 Ultra starts at 9,999 yuan. Compared to the previous generation, the standard and + versions increased by 1,000 yuan, and the Ultra version increased by 300 yuan.

According to a report by Kechuangban Daily, several industry chain insiders confirmed that the current procurement cost of smartphone storage chips has increased by over 80% compared to the same period last year, with no signs of slowing down. Due to this cost pressure, channel and ODM manufacturers have revealed that major smartphone brands such as OPPO, OnePlus, vivo, Xiaomi, iQOO, and Honor are planning a new round of price adjustments. This will be the largest and most significant collective price increase in the smartphone industry in the past five years. With memory costs fluctuating frequently, China’s smartphone market in 2026 may face multiple price hikes within a single year for the first time in history.

Regarding the specific increase, IDC predicts that the average selling price of smartphones in 2026 will rise to $465 per unit, with total market revenue reaching $578.9 billion, setting a new record. Notably, some tech media previously reported that starting from March, smartphone prices will accelerate their increase, with new models seeing minimum price hikes of over 1,000 yuan; subsequent releases after March will see even larger increases, with minimum hikes not less than 1,000 yuan, and high-end flagship models potentially increasing by 2,000 to 3,000 yuan.

Industry insiders believe that with the continuous rise in mobile memory and storage chip prices and no signs of slowdown, a comprehensive price increase for smartphones in 2026 is inevitable. As for whether the specific prices will reach the 1,000 to 3,000 yuan range as rumored, no manufacturers have responded yet, and it remains to be seen.

An industry chain source told the Daily Economic News that mobile phone manufacturers are also “victims” of this round of price hikes, as their procurement costs are simply “unsustainable.”

(Source: Daily Economic News)