Oppo and OnePlus are raising prices from March 16 | Infinium-tech

Oppo has announced that it will be raising the prices of some of its cheaper devices as well as OnePlus devices in China from 12am local time on March 16. The price hike will affect the Oppo A and K series as well as all OnePlus models sold in China.

At least for now, the prices of neither the Reno and Find series smartphones nor the Oppo tablets will be increased. These are higher-margin devices from the brand, so it makes sense that they wouldn’t be affected just yet.

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Although the company hasn’t given any official reason for this price increase or any indication of how much prices will actually rise, it’s easy to guess that it all has to do with AI data centers being an incredibly attractive customer for memory chip makers, who are all shifting production away from the DRAM and NAND flash chips used in smartphones in favor of the HBM (high-bandwidth memory) that AI data centers desperately need.

This makes memory for smartphones more expensive, which will inevitably result in smartphone prices rising, and the cheapest models will be affected the most, as they have the lowest margins to begin with. According to IDC, memory semiconductors now account for more than 20% of smartphone production costs, up from 10% to 15% previously. For entry-level devices, it’s closer to 30%.

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