Storage “Supercycle” Spurs a Wave of Price Hikes Across Consumer Electronics: Laptops and Chinese Smartphones Raise Prices Together

Kaichuang Board Daily reported on January 10 that recent interviews with multiple industry sources show storage price increases are now clearly flowing through to the consumer electronics market. Key categories such as smartphones and laptops have begun adjusting prices, with the most visible moves coming from leading PC brands.

On the PC side, major notebook manufacturers including Lenovo, Dell, and HP have reportedly implemented broad price hikes of roughly RMB 500–1,500, reflecting the faster pass-through of rising component costs in the laptop supply chain.

In smartphones, several new domestic handset releases are also trending higher. Compared with their previous-generation counterparts, many models are seeing price increases of around RMB 100–600 as vendors rebalance bill-of-material costs under a more expensive storage environment.

Meanwhile, the impact on AIoT chip vendors appears more mixed, with different companies experiencing varying degrees of cost pressure depending on product positioning, inventory strategy, and customer structure.

At the same time, certain segments of the supply chain—such as chip testing and related service providers—are poised to benefit as pricing shifts and procurement cycles accelerate.

One brokerage electronics analyst noted that a truly broad-based and sustained upswing in storage pricing is most likely to materialize in 2026. The current cycle, they argued, is being driven by a combination of demand-supply mismatch, capital expenditure dynamics, and technology transitions, and could extend through the end of 2026—or even into 2027.