China’s smartphone makers like OPPO, Vivo, Xiaomi, and Transsion are planning to lower their smartphone units in sales for 2026. And the major reason behind this decision is the rising storage prices in the Chinese consumer market.
A reliable source noted that top Chinese phone vendors like OPPO, Vivo, Xiaomi, and Transsion lowered their smartphone sales units for this year’s shipment forecast.
For instance, Xiaomi and OPPO have reduced the quantities by more than 20%. Meanwhile, Vivo has gone down by nearly 15%, and Transsion has predicted less than 70 million smartphone units on 2026 shipment topic.
Notably, all these companies have cut the phone shipments from the mid-to-low-end category and certain overseas products, focusing solely on the flagship devices.
One of the insiders told the source that brands often use this protocol to obtain sufficient materials and components from the top-end suppliers without any issue.
“In order to obtain resources from upstream manufacturers, mobile phone makers often adopt a strategy of overreporting their shipments. In reality, storage suppliers such as Samsung and SK Hynix have not received any notification from phone vendors that they have lowered their expected shipment volumes.”
(Image Credits: Sina)
Another employee of a storage manufacturer confirmed the strategy, saying that the reported volume is about the same as achieved last year with a slight difference. While Transsion lowered the volume, it is still expected to hit 100+ million units.
“A 20% reduction is an exaggerated statement in our opinion. We will not prepare inventory according to this volume. We judge that (the actual data) will be reduced by about 10% only.”
On the other hand, Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix aim to protect their phone customers by offering other phone makers prices that fluctuate in line with server prices. Or else, customers won’t be able to purchase the upcoming devices.
Samsung and SK Hynix already planned to increase DRAM prices starting in the first quarter by around 60-70%. And this may directly affect phone makers.
Interestingly, this hike will not impact brands like Huawei, Honor, and Lenovo, as they have their independent solutions. Besides, these brands are working to garner more market share under the “storage price hike” strategies.
Specifically Huawei, as it is still maintaining a certain profit margin on its products by leveraging the cost benefits it gets from its supply chain. The firm is also discussing the possibility of lowering prices for Pura, Nova, and Enjoy phones to boost its market share.
It would be worth seeing how this matter shapes in the upcoming months among the top smartphone makers.
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