India’s smartphone market is seeing a sharp rise in prices with rising memory costs squeezing the entry-level segment and pushing consumers and devices into higher price bands.
The scale of price correction has been significant and the impact is felt the most on the entry-level and sub-₹15,000 segment, industry analysts told businessline. The impact is across brands like Vivo, Oppo, Xiaomi, Samsung and Lava among others as the cost of LPDDR memory, which is a key component across smartphone models, are skyrocketing as capacity gets diverted to data centre needs.
As per Counterpoint Research estimates shared with businessline, over 80 out of 200 smartphone models in India had seen price hikes by March 2026, with an average increase of around 15 per cent. Further hikes of a similar magnitude are expected in Q2 of 2026, while new launches could be priced 30-40 per cent higher in some cases, Counterpoint’s analysis showed.
“In the sub-₹10,000 (phones priced below ₹10,000) segment alone, over 20 models out of a total of 34 models have already witnessed price increase,” said Tarun Pathak, Research Director, Counterpoint. The delta between feature phones and entry-level smartphones is about ₹4,000 now and that gap will further increase in 2026 due to rising memory prices and strengthening of the dollar, Pathak said.
Entry-tier most hit
The rising prices are also changing the composition of smartphone shipments in the market.
As a result of price hikes, shipment share in the sub-₹10,000 segment has dropped to around 12 per cent in Q1 2026 from 19 per cent in Q3 2025, Counterpoint estimates showed.
“The entry-tier segment (sub-₹15,000) has been the most impacted due to the memory price hike situation. Brands operating in this segment do operate on razor-thin margins and have little room to absorb input price shocks,” Pathak said, noting that the sub-₹15,000 segment’s shipment share has gone down to 33 per cent in Q1 2026 from 41 per cent in Q3 2025. This has pushed many of the models operating in the sub-₹15,000 segment have now gone up to the ₹15,000-30,000 price segment.
Upasana Joshi, Senior Research Manager, IDC India, noted that the underlying cause remains the sustained increase in memory prices, which is affecting devices across price tiers but disproportionately impacting sub-$300 smartphones.
Entry-level 5G devices that were once available for around ₹9,000 are now closer to ₹12,000, with memory supply constraints and elevated prices likely to persist until at least mid-2027, Joshi said.
Published on April 15, 2026