Renewing your smartphone will not happen straight away. According to research firm IDC, the global smartphone market will experience its biggest decline in more than a decade in 2026. Deliveries are expected to fall by 12.9% to 1.12 billion units, compared to 1.26 billion in 2025. A collapse that no one anticipated on this scale. IDC itself described a much less gloomy scenario as “pessimistic” only two months ago.
The cause? The massive demand for RAM in phones, also called RAM, is the component that allows applications to run continuously. Tech giants like Meta, Google and Microsoft have paid billions in recent years to build the IT infrastructure to exploit their new AI. These gigantic data centers have a colossal appetite for memory chips, to the point of drying up the global market. Manufacturers naturally followed the money by prioritizing sales for these same groups. As a result, smartphones are lining up to obtain components that have become rare. This crisis already has a name: “RAMageddon”.
Smartphone prices are soaring
« What we are seeing is not a temporary squeeze, but a tsunami-like shock from the memory supply chain », summarizes Francisco Jeronimo, vice-president of IDC. For consumers, the average selling price of a smartphone is expected to jump 14% this year, reaching a record $523. The African and Middle Eastern market is expected to decline by more than 20%, and smartphones priced under $100 could, according to IDC, become “ definitely unprofitable ».
