According to the latest analyst forecasts, higher smartphone prices won’t be changing anytime soon amid a record-setting drop in shipments.
IDC reports that its forecast for the 2026 global smartphone market has taken a turn for the worst. Where a drop of roughly 14% was expected, that’s now up to a whopping 16.7% fall year-over-year. It’s a drop of around 200 million smartphones. The second half of the year, which we’re well into, will see the hardest hit.
Of course, the number of smartphones shipped has little to no impact on the end user, besides they might stick on their current device a bit longer.
What does have impact is pricing, with higher prices for smartphones apparently set to stick around “permanently.” The prices of memory are expected to continue going up through at least 2028 and, even after that, IDC forecasts that average selling prices will only go down by around 1-2% per year starting in 2028. In other words, next year’s smartphones will probably be even more expensive than this year’s releases, and low-end devices will only become harder to find as brands focus on the higher-end models that don’t have such thin margins.
As memory prices are expected to continue increasing until at least 2028, vendors are adapting their portfolios to a permanently higher cost structure. The 173 million smartphones below $100, which shipped last year, are facing an existential crisis. Android players focused on low-end devices, which were already operating on razor-thin margins, are cutting low-end models and pushing a higher-end product mix. In Q2 2026, this segment saw an almost 60% YoY drop and is expected to fall faster in the second half…
