Xiaomi raises its mobile phone shipment target

On July 21, Jiemian News learned from the supply chain that Xiaomi has raised its full-year 2026 smartphone shipment target from approximately 90 million units to 110 million units, marking an increase of roughly 16%. The incremental portion of this upward adjustment primarily comes from entry-level device models.

A source close to Xiaomi told Jiemian News that this upward revision of the shipment target stems from the company's internal assessment that the current memory market trend is poised for a reversal. Due to the continuous shortfalls and rising costs of upstream memory chips, Xiaomi had twice lowered its shipment targets earlier this year.

In January 2026, Jiemian News exclusively reported that due to memory price hikes across the upstream supply chain, multiple phone manufacturers including Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, and Transsion cut their full-year handset order volumes, with Xiaomi's reduction exceeding 20%. Following that, Xiaomi's 2026 shipment target dropped from the initial roughly 170 million units (the actual 2025 performance level) to 135 million units. On June 30, Nikkei Asia, citing informed sources, reported that Xiaomi further revised down its full-year shipment forecast by around 30% to approximately 95 million units, representing a contraction of over 40% compared to the projection made at the start of the year.

Industry insiders revealed to Jiemian News that downstream manufacturers such as smartphone brands have begun to show clear resistance to the ongoing memory price increases. Not long ago, OPPO and vivo rejected Samsung's third-quarter quotation, even though the price increase in that offer was relatively modest compared to the previous two quarters.

The aforementioned source also stated that the signal brought by Xiaomi's upward adjustment of its shipment target is that downstream players in the memory industry are no longer willing to pay for the continuously climbing memory costs. Once the tolerance threshold on the demand side is reached, the momentum driving price hikes is likely to hit an inflection point.

Since the second half of 2025, the global memory industry has entered a "supercycle of price surge". Data from TrendForce shows that in the third quarter of 2025, DRAM prices rose 171.8% year-on-year, followed by a further 45%–50% increase in the fourth quarter. Entering 2026, the growth continued to expand: the DRAM contract price jumped 90%–95% in the first quarter, while NAND Flash prices increased by 55%–60%, both hitting the largest single-quarter growth rates in history. In the second quarter, DRAM prices rose another 58%–64% quarter-on-quarter, and NAND Flash prices increased 54%–75% quarter-on-quarter.

The three industry giants Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have redirected a large portion of their advanced process production capacity toward higher-margin HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) and server DRAM, resulting in a severe shortage of consumer-grade memory. Approximately 70% of the world's memory production capacity is consumed by data centers, leaving end-user devices such as smartphones and PCs as the segment squeezed out and sacrificed in this capacity reallocation.

In April 2026, Samsung officially stopped accepting new orders for LPDDR4 products. Micron and SK Hynix had already ceased taking such orders as early as the end of 2025. The "low-cost memory" that serves as the core component for budget smartphones is disappearing from the market. Industry calculations indicate that memory costs account for over 30% of the BOM (Bill of Materials) for entry-level phones priced under $200, while the proportion is less than 10% for premium phones above $800. Facing the same DRAM price surge, entry-level devices would need a 40%–50% retail price increase to maintain profit margins, whereas high-end models only require a 5%–8% price hike.

As a result, global smartphone market forecasts have been repeatedly revised downward: Counterpoint Research cut its 2026 global shipment estimate to roughly 1.08 billion units in early June, expanding the year-on-year decline from the 2.1% forecast at the start of the year to 13.9%, marking the lowest level since 2013. Over the same period, IDC projected a 13% year-on-year drop in global shipments to around 1.1 billion units. TrendForce also revised its forecast from a 0.1% annual growth to a 2% annual decline.

However, the demand side hitting its tolerance ceiling does not mean prices will immediately decline. Multiple industry insiders pointed out to Jiemian News that despite downstream manufacturers beginning to resist price hikes, the current reality of memory chip shortages remains difficult to reverse. On one hand, AI data centers' demand for HBM and enterprise-grade memory continues to surge, prompting the three major original manufacturers to shift large amounts of their advanced production capacity to these high-profit segments. On the other hand, leading memory producers including Samsung, SK Hynix, and Kioxia are continuing to cut consumer-grade memory output to sustain their high-price strategies.

According to data from market research firm Omdia, Samsung Electronics' 2026 NAND wafer production volume will decrease from 4.9 million wafers in 2025 to 4.68 million wafers. SK Hynix's output will drop from approximately 1.9 million wafers to 1.7 million wafers, and Kioxia will adjust its production from 4.8 million wafers to 4.69 million wafers. At the same time, the capital expenditures of the three major manufacturers are being structurally redirected toward HBM and server DRAM, further squeezing consumer-grade memory production capacity.

As of press time, Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo have not issued any responses to the aforementioned news.

This article is sourced from the WeChat Official Account "Polyhedron InterfaceX", authored by Li Jiaqi, edited by Wen Shuqi, and published with authorization from 36Kr.