A global memory-chip shortage — driven by AI and data-center demand for DRAM and high-bandwidth memory — is about to make smartphones more expensive for buyers everywhere, and the clearest illustration of how severe it has become is a striking contradiction inside Samsung itself. Even as Samsung Electronics just posted the highest quarterly profit in its history, its phone-making unit is projected to swing to a Samsung mobile division loss for the first time ever — because it is Samsung’s own chip arm charging premium prices for the very memory that is squeezing its handset business. The uncomfortable part for the rest of us: every Android brand buys memory on the same global market, so this points to higher prices on upcoming phones across the board, not just Galaxy devices.
Record company profit, a projected phone-division loss
On July 7, 2026, Samsung Electronics issued official earnings guidance for the second quarter of 2026: consolidated sales of roughly 171 trillion Korean won and consolidated operating profit of about 89.4 trillion won. That profit is an all-time record for the company — roughly a 19-fold jump, about 1,181%, year-on-year — and Samsung attributes it to AI-related demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and tightening supply of conventional DRAM, which has pushed memory prices sharply higher. Samsung’s official guidance release confirms those figures. One caveat: this is a preliminary, whole-company number with no division-by-division breakdown. The detailed results, split between the semiconductor (Device Solutions) and mobile (Device Experience / MX) arms, land at Samsung’s earnings call on July 30, 2026.
That is where the twist comes in. According to an analysis by South Korea’s DealSite, as reported by SamMobile and GSMArena, Samsung’s Mobile eXperience (MX) division — the unit that builds Galaxy phones — could post its first-ever quarterly operating loss in Q2 2026. The estimates span a wide range depending on the model used: from a possible profit of about $1.38 billion (roughly 1.9 trillion won) to a possible loss of about $1.09 billion (roughly 1.5 trillion won). Different outlets summarizing the same DealSite analysis disagreed on where inside that band the number lands, so the honest read is a direction rather than a point figure — MX looks increasingly likely to tip into loss territory. For scale, the same DealSite-sourced reporting notes MX earned around $2.04 billion in operating profit in Q1 2026 and about $2.26 billion in Q2 2025, so a loss would be a sharp reversal. It is worth remembering that even during the 2016 Galaxy Note7 battery-recall crisis — as GSMArena’s write-up of the DealSite figures points out — Samsung’s mobile arm stayed in the black, posting a modest profit of roughly $73 million. That is the benchmark that makes a “first-ever loss” meaningful.
Why memory prices are doing the damage
The mechanism is simple, and it is the same one inflating Samsung’s chip profit. Memory is now a much bigger slice of what a phone costs to build. Per the DealSite-sourced analysis, the memory-chip share of the bill of materials for a roughly $800 smartphone reportedly climbed from about 14% to about 23% for RAM alone, with NAND flash storage adding a further 15% or so of production cost. When one arm of Samsung sells that memory at record prices, the other arm — which has to buy it — eats the difference.
This is not a Samsung-only quirk, and that is the important part for buyers. Tom’s Hardware has reported that server memory prices are on track to double year-on-year in 2026, with LPDDR5X — the RAM used in flagship phones — potentially following the same path, describing it as a “seismic shift” in which even smartphone-class memory is no longer safe from the AI-driven crunch. WCCFTech reported that Apple’s supply contract for 12GB LPDDR5X memory for its foldable iPhone came in at roughly double what Apple paid a year earlier. Broader industry reporting has pegged mobile LPDDR5X RAM and UFS 4.1 flash storage increases at around 80-90% over 2025 pricing in early 2026. The downstream effect is already visible: AndroidPure previously reported that global smartphone shipments fell 4% year-on-year in Q2 2026, with Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo all losing share as the memory shortage made budget and mid-range phones costlier to build, while Samsung and Apple gained ground.
What the Samsung mobile division loss means for phone buyers
Strip away the corporate scoreboard and here is the reader’s stake. Higher memory costs at the factory are a leading indicator of higher prices at the store — and not just for Galaxy phones. Xiaomi, OnePlus, Vivo, Oppo, and Apple all source RAM and flash from the same squeezed global supply, so the pressure that is projected to push Samsung’s own phone unit into the red is the same pressure that makes it harder for any brand to hold last year’s prices, especially on the budget and mid-range tiers where margins are thin and a RAM or storage bump can no longer be treated as “free.” Do not read this as a story about Samsung having a hard year that deserves sympathy; read it as an early warning that the phone you were planning to buy is likely to cost more, or ship with less RAM and storage at the same price.
One firm caveat before anyone treats the loss as settled: Samsung’s record overall profit and the July 30 date are confirmed, but the MX loss itself is a single-source projection from DealSite, relayed by SamMobile and GSMArena, and not independently verified. Samsung will confirm the actual division-level numbers at its earnings call on July 30, 2026. The trend behind the projection — memory getting dramatically more expensive — is not in doubt, whichever way MX’s final line lands.
Sources: SamMobile, GSMArena, Tom’s Hardware, WCCFTech
