Smartphone Price Hike 2025: There is a bad news for people thinking of buying a smartphone before the festive season. An increase in the prices of low-cost and mid-range smartphones may be seen between October and December 2025. The reason is the rapidly increasing prices of memory chips used in these devices, which has increased the production costs of companies.

Huge reduction in supply of memory chips

According to the report, TrendForce has said that the supply of memory chips used in smartphones is continuously decreasing. The biggest reason for this is that chip manufacturing companies are now changing the focus of their production. They are now focusing more on making high-bandwidth memory (HBM) needed for high-performance computers and AI data centers rather than typical mobile memory. As the demand for AI servers and data centers is increasing, the need for HBM memory is also increasing rapidly. This change has affected the market for traditional smartphone memory chips.

Prices of LPDDR4X chips jump by 10%

Due to increasing demand and decreasing supply, many smartphone companies have started advance booking of chips so that they can avoid the crisis of shortage. But the move further upsets the supply-demand balance, with prices of memory chips like LPDDR4X likely to rise by more than 10% this quarter.

Parv Sharma, analyst at Counterpoint Research, says, “This entire change is happening due to the increasing needs of AI servers. Chip manufacturers are now showing more interest in making HBM because it gives them higher profits and better returns compared to smartphone parts.”

NAND flash storage prices also increased by 10%

Not only memory chips, but also the prices of NAND flash storage used in smartphones are continuously increasing. According to TrendForce report, NAND flash prices are likely to rise by 5% to 10% this quarter.

Impact of increased costs on consumers

Experts believe that in the coming months, smartphone companies will have only two options, either to cut the features of their phones, or pass the burden of increased costs on to the customers. That is, in the coming days, cheap smartphones will not be as cheap as before and consumers may have to spend a little more.