Oppo and OnePlus are raising prices from March 16

Oppo has announced that it will raise prices on some of its cheaper devices in China, as well as on OnePlus devices, starting on March 16 at 12AM local time. The price hikes will affect all OnePlus models sold in China, alongside the Oppo A and K series.

For now at least, prices won't be increased for the Reno and Find series smartphones, nor the Oppo tablets. These are the brand's higher-margin devices, so it makes sense that they wouldn't be affected yet.

While the company hasn't provided an official reason for this price hike, or any indication of how much the prices will actually go up, it's easy to speculate that it all has to do with AI data centers being incredibly lucrative customers for memory chip makers, who are all shifting production away from DRAM and NAND flash chips used in smartphones in favor of HBM (high-bandwidth memory) that the AI data centers desperately need a lot of.

This makes memory for smartphones more expensive, which in turn will inevitably drive prices for smartphones up, and the cheapest models will be affected the most, since their margins are the lowest 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, that's closer to 30%.

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