Samsung spent its Q2 earnings call telling investors that the memory shortage squeezing the industry will get worse through 2027 and stay tight until at least 2028. Two days later, the bill arrived at a checkout page: at midnight on 2 August, Xiaomi raised the China prices of the Xiaomi 17 series, the Redmi K90 line and the Redmi Turbo 5 by 300 to 500 yuan a phone. This is what a component crisis looks like when it stops being a supply-chain story and starts being a number on a product listing.
The new Xiaomi 17 and Redmi K90 prices in China
IT之家 first reported that Xiaomi sales staff had circulated increase notices on the evening of 1 August, then confirmed after midnight that Xiaomi’s own store listings had actually moved. These are live retail prices, not a leaked plan — though they arrived without any public announcement from Xiaomi. The starting prices now read:
- Xiaomi 17 — 4,499 → 4,799 yuan (up 500)
- Xiaomi 17 Pro — 4,999 → 5,399 yuan (up 400)
- Xiaomi 17 Pro Max — 5,999 → 6,499 yuan (up 500)
- Redmi K90 — 2,799 → 3,099 yuan (up 300)
- Redmi K90 Max — 3,199 → 3,499 yuan (up 300)
- Redmi K90 Pro Max — 4,199 → 4,499 yuan (up 300)
- Redmi K90 Elite Edition — 2,999 → 3,299 yuan (up 300)
- Redmi Turbo 5 — 2,299 → 2,599 yuan (up 300)
- Redmi Turbo 5 Max — 2,499 → 2,799 yuan (up 300)
Roughly $40 to $70 per handset, in other words. And this is not the first pass: the standard Redmi K90 and the K90 Pro Max had already been marked up by 200 yuan earlier, and the Turbo 5’s Spring Festival promotional pricing was quietly withdrawn. Stack those together and a K90 buyer is now paying 500 yuan more than a buyer a few months ago, across two separate increases neither of which was announced with any fanfare.
Why phone prices are rising: the memory shortage
The cause is not Xiaomi’s alone. Samsung, which makes about a third of the world’s memory chips, used its Q2 earnings call to say the RAM squeeze will intensify in 2027 and hold through 2028. Per TechCrunch’s report on the call, frontier AI labs are now “sharing their medium- to long-term demand forecasts” directly with Samsung to lock in future supply — which lets Samsung prioritise customers who sign multi-year contracts, and tells you exactly where the wafers are going.
The consequence shows up in Samsung’s own results: record semiconductor sales in Q2, but shrinking profitability in its phone and TV divisions, because those divisions have to buy the expensive chips. Samsung has already raised Galaxy phone and tablet prices and watched demand fall as a result. Apple raised Mac and iPad pricing. Nvidia is expected to push GPU prices up 20 to 30 percent. Xiaomi’s 300 yuan is not an outlier; it is the same event reaching a different price list. We covered the contractual side of this when Nvidia and SK Hynix signed their supply deal — capacity being committed to AI years in advance is precisely what makes this hard to wait out.
Budget buyers absorb the worst of it
The uncomfortable part is who pays proportionally more. Take the two phones that got the identical 300 yuan increase at opposite ends of the range: on the 4,199 yuan Redmi K90 Pro Max that is 7.1 percent, while on the 2,299 yuan Redmi Turbo 5 the very same 300 yuan is 13 percent. The cheaper the phone, the larger the share of its cost that memory represents, and the harder a flat increase lands. Xiaomi Group partner and president Lu Weibing, who also runs the phone division and the Xiaomi brand, made the point himself in a post reported by IT之家 in early July (translated from Chinese):
The phone industry is going through its most severe moment in nearly a decade; out-of-control costs have already swept across the entire phone market, and budget phones are without question the worst hurt.
Separately, in April, Lu said memory prices for the same configuration had jumped nearly four times compared with the first quarter of 2025, adding roughly 1,500 yuan of cost to a 12GB+512GB build. That April figure is now several months old, and prices have not gone the other way since.
What it means outside China
These are China prices, and nothing here confirms matching increases elsewhere. But the pattern is already visible in other markets: Xiaomi raised Indian prices on five Xiaomi and Redmi models in late July, by ₹500 to ₹5,000. If you are shopping in any market, the practical advice is unglamorous but real — a discounted phone on the shelf today was priced against last quarter’s memory contracts, and waiting for a better deal is, for once, a bet against the odds. Buy the storage tier you actually need, because the jump from 256GB to 512GB is exactly the part of the bill of materials getting more expensive.
Sources: IT之家, TechCrunch
