The end of the thousand‑yuan phone era: rising storage prices make old handsets valuable

Overview

A surge in memory prices has quietly re‑priced the mobile phone afterlife. Dead and broken handsets that once fetched the price of a pair of scissors are now being traded for hundreds of yuan — one buyer reported swapping four broken devices, including an Apple 6S and a Xiaomi (小米), for 820 RMB. It has been reported that the driver is a 2025–2026 spike in semiconductor memory: in Q1 2026 consumer‑electronics storage costs rose more than 60% quarter‑on‑quarter, and NAND flash reportedly jumped over 70%. DRAM and NAND are the twin engines of every phone’s performance and capacity; when both go up, everything upstream and downstream feels it.

Industry impact

Phone makers have begun to pass costs on. OPPO (OPPO) announced price increases from March 16 affecting A‑ and K‑series models; vivo (vivo) and iQOO (iQOO) followed days later. Mid‑range phones that once competed around the “千元机” (thousand‑yuan phone) price point are being repriced by 200–500 RMB or more. Even some high‑end devices have not been spared: Honor (荣耀)’s top‑spec Magic V6 reportedly saw a 1,000 RMB jump for large‑storage SKUs. Xiaomi’s (小米) latest financials show smartphone gross margins under pressure, with management citing core component inflation and heightened domestic competition.

Winners and losers in the supply chain

Winners are those with scale and inventory. Jiangbolong (江波龙), a leading domestic NAND module maker, has seen profits and stock gains as it built inventory ahead of the run‑up; it reported materially higher net‑profit guidance after the price rally. But small module houses and independent solution providers are squeezed. It has been reported that many companies are turning to “second‑hand” or reclaimed dies to survive — cheaper but lower‑reliability parts that can halve memory cost but raise defect rates — while some smaller vendors simply stop taking orders.

Why it happened — AI demand and geopolitical pressure

The shock is not random. Analysts point to explosive AI server and data‑center demand that has prompted wafer fabs to prioritize high‑margin HBM and server DRAM over commodity NAND and mobile DRAM. It has been reported that Samsung (三星) planned to convert some NAND lines to DRAM for this reason; SK‑Hynix (SK海力士) and other vendors have likewise run inventories down to critically low levels. Add a backdrop of trade policy and U.S.‑China tech competition that complicates equipment flows and capacity planning, and you have a perfect storm. The result: more expensive new phones, a red‑hot secondary market, and a painful squeeze on the small firms that still make the industry’s basic parts. Who ultimately bears the cost — consumers, brands, or the weakest suppliers — remains the central question.