Mobile phone manufacturers' promotional discounts offset price increases. Will the 1,000-yuan phones really disappear?

Securities Times reporter Zhuo Yong; intern Zhou Shuhan

After OPPO and vivo successively raised the prices of multiple models, Xiaomi has also, in recent days, officially announced that it will adjust the suggested retail prices of some models currently on sale starting April 11. Wei Siqi, general manager of Xiaomi China’s marketing department, said plainly: “This round of memory price increases—both the trend and the magnitude—still far exceeded expectations.”

A round of mobile-phone pricing changes triggered by storage chip price hikes is currently spreading across the board. As major brands gradually raise prices—especially entry-level and mid-to-low-end models being hit first—many consumers have said on social media that they plan to delay upgrading, take a wait-and-see stance while holding their cash. Discussions about “will the thousand-yuan phones disappear?” have also heated up.

Securities Times reporters recently conducted on-site visits to multiple offline stores in Shenzhen and connected with industry insiders to reconstruct the real situation and impact of this round of phone price increases.

Manufacturers offset the increase with promotional discounts

During visits to several major phone retail venues in Shenzhen, reporters found that multiple models from each brand indeed showed price increases to varying degrees. However, the brands also simultaneously rolled out promotions such as discounts and “buy more, pay less,” and added policy subsidies on top—so the final price customers pay does not “increase in a shocking way.”

At an OPPO store in a shopping mall, a sales staff member told the reporter that the A-series and K-series, which focus on mid-to-low-end segments, generally rose by about 300 yuan. The impact is even more obvious for the OnePlus series: some models even increased by more than 500 yuan. The reporter also noted that models such as OPPO A6 and A6s have their prices marked in red; the store clerk explained: “The official price went up, but at the same time there were discounts—so it’s effectively pulled the price back.”

A staff member at a vivo store in the same mall also said that most models’ prices were indeed adjusted upward, but the stores provide supporting promotional subsidies to try to ease the pressure on consumers.

Many store clerks mentioned that now, when purchasing a phone, customers can enjoy national subsidies: 15% of the final price, with a maximum subsidy of 500 yuan. Calculated out, it is roughly an 85% discount. The OPPO store also further said that Shenzhen mobile users can additionally stack operator subsidies, making the final price even more favorable.

As for the trend of prices going forward, most frontline sales staff believe that “it’s still going to rise.”

A sales representative at a Xiaomi Home store disclosed: “Right now, RedmI Note 15 is selling at 1,199 yuan and hasn’t increased yet, but after June it might rise to 1,299 yuan or even higher.” The staff at a Honor store also said that in the future, phone prices will most likely be adjusted upward, though which specific models and by how much are not yet clear.

Phone price increases were also “confirmed” through distributor channels. An agent named Mr. Lu told reporters that the prices he pays for goods from upstream have indeed risen. However, the price increases for thousand-yuan phones are relatively moderate: a unit goes up by about 60 to 70 yuan. He also raised the retail prices accordingly, and the profit margins have not been squeezed.

“OPPO A6 cost me over 1,300 yuan to buy in a year ago, and after the New Year it rose to nearly 1,400 yuan within one or two weeks. But it went back to the pre–New Year level after about two weeks.” Mr. Lu said that compared with the small fluctuations of thousand-yuan phones, price increases are more obvious for mid-to-high-end models. “iPhone 17 Pro Max increased by 300 yuan after the year, and mid-to-high-end Android phones also generally rose by one or two hundred yuan.”

The reporter noted that with new phones generally seeing price increases, many consumers have turned their attention to the secondhand market. During visits in Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei area, reporters found that the resale and recycling of secondhand phones and related accessories are extremely active. “These secondhand phones of ours have gone up too—Apple has also gone up. They all increased by around one or two hundred yuan. When chip prices started rising half a month ago, the prices began to rise as well, and it’s hard to go down now.” A person running a secondhand phone recycling counter at a communications market told the reporter.

Some merchants also said that prices of low-end models have also risen to varying degrees. As Securities Times previously reported, the recycling prices of secondhand phones on multiple online and offline channels have indeed gone up, but there has been no “sky-high recycling” rumored.

Year-over-year decline in shipment volume

A smartphone consists of hundreds or even thousands of individual components. Among them, a stable, high-performance storage system is a key support for phone operation. Storage chips therefore are one of the core components with the highest share in a phone’s cost structure. During the visits, industry insiders generally attributed the cause of this round of phone price increases to storage chip price hikes. Moreover, the larger the phone’s storage capacity, the higher the increase may be.

Data released by the National Development and Reform Commission’s Price Monitoring Center on February 28 shows that as of January 2026, the prices of the two major types of global storage chips—DRAM (memory) and NAND flash—have both hit the highest levels since data has been collected since 2016. A research institute in China’s high-tech industry, Jibang Consulting, noted that taking storage capacity of 8GB+256GB as an example, the estimated contract price for the first quarter of 2026 is up nearly 200% year over year compared with the same period in 2025.

Guo Tianxiang, research manager at IDC China, said that as demand for AI servers and AI terminals has surged, it is crazily consuming memory production capacity. Major mainstream storage manufacturers have shifted capacity to AI-dedicated memory with higher profit margins, and the supply of ordinary memory used for phones and PCs has remained persistently tight.

IDC expects that storage supply pressure will run throughout all of 2026 and even continue into 2027. Affected by this, global smartphone shipments in 2026 are expected to decline by 12.9%, and revenue will fall by 0.5%.

China’s Information and Communication Research Institute (CAICT) data also shows that in February 2026, domestic smartphone shipments were 16.26M units, down 12.6% year over year. From January to February 2026, smartphone shipments were 36.95M units, down 14.3% year over year.

With shipment volume declining, price increases for some models have been further intensified. The reporter learned from an offline authorized store called “JD Home” in Shenzhen that store supply has been affected to some extent, which also pushes prices higher. However, for agents like Mr. Lu who have fixed daily supply quotas, the overall reduction in market supply has almost no impact on their quantity of goods to purchase, and price fluctuations are also relatively small. “The bigger impact is generally on online self-operated stores, but if you factor in subsidies, online-channel prices won’t rise too much either.”

Will thousand-yuan opportunities exit the market?

In the short term, cost pressure in the mobile phone industry is difficult to ease. Some people worry that if memory chip prices continue to stay at a high level, thousand-yuan phones may gradually exit the market.

“It’s impossible for thousand-yuan phones to be eliminated.” Mr. Lu, a frontline sales representative, said directly. In his view, the thousand-yuan phone market has a fairly fixed customer base—older users, most of whom rely on retirement pensions, who do not have high demands for phone configurations but are more sensitive to price. He predicts that in the next two years, mid-to-low-end phones will not see huge price hikes. In comparison, mid-to-high-end phones will be affected more. “Young customers buy mid-to-high-end models more, but they aren’t as sensitive to price.”

For price-sensitive customers, new thousand-yuan phones are still being launched in the market. For example, on April 2, Huawei Enjoy 90 Pro Max and Enjoy 90 Plus were officially launched. Leveraging the Kirin chip and a pricing within the thousand-yuan range, they won first place in the JD mobile phone best-seller list for the 1,000–2,000 yuan price segment on the day of launch. On the same day, Honor launched a new thousand-yuan model, X80i, scheduled to go on sale on April 10.

But Guo Tianxiang pointed out that in the future, chip supply will further tilt toward large manufacturers, and this trend will be even more evident in the smartphone industry. The thin profits of budget smartphones can hardly absorb a large rise in storage prices. Some manufacturers will exit related price segments, or launch products with clearly reduced specifications but possibly higher prices.

Some viewpoints suggest that this round of price hikes may become an opportunity for the mobile phone market to transform—forcing the market to shift from simply “competing on price” to “competing on value,” with greater emphasis on products and user experience.

(Editor: Wen Jing)

Keywords:

                                                            Phone