Global smartphone shipments are forecast to fall 14.3% year on year in 2026, according to Counterpoint Research’s latest Smartphone Market Outlook Tracker, published on 21 August. Counterpoint does not expect the decline to end there: 2027 is forecast to decline a further 1.4% before a stronger recovery begins in 2028.
The headline number matters less to a buyer than what sits underneath it. This is not a forecast about people losing interest in phones. It is a forecast about phones that will simply stop being made, because the parts inside them cost more than the price tier they were built for can absorb.
Samsung is forecast to retake the global No. 1 position
Counterpoint expects Samsung to grow shipments roughly 0.8% in 2026 — a modest number in isolation, but enough to put it back on top when the market around it is shrinking by double digits. The firm credits Samsung’s own component business, the breadth of its lineup and its carrier and retail relationships for that resilience.
“Samsung’s return to the top position comes down to its internal component capabilities, broad portfolio and established operator and retail relationships, giving it more flexibility to secure supply, redirect products between markets and maintain availability. Samsung may accept some pressure on profitability to capture volume share, but that trade off should still leave it better positioned than most competitors during the downturn.”
That is Yang Wang, Principal Analyst at Counterpoint Research. Read it carefully and it is less a story about Samsung winning than about Samsung being the one company that makes its own memory and can therefore keep shipping while rivals queue for it.
Apple slips slightly, Chinese brands take the real hit
Apple is forecast to decline about 2.1% in 2026 before returning to roughly 2.8% growth in 2027 — comfortably better than the market, helped by premium pricing, financing and what Counterpoint describes as preferential access to critical components. Apple’s first foldable is expected in Q3 2026, but Counterpoint puts it in the high single-digit millions of units and says that is unlikely to change Apple’s overall shipment trajectory.
The damage is concentrated further down. Across the leading Chinese manufacturers — Counterpoint’s grouping covers HONOR, Huawei, OPPO Group (including OnePlus and realme), Transsion Group (TECNO, Infinix, itel), vivo and Xiaomi — shipments are forecast to fall by roughly 15% to 34% in 2026. Those brands sell disproportionately into price-sensitive and emerging markets, which is exactly where a component cost increase has nowhere to hide. Huawei is the exception, forecast to grow around 8% this year on the strength of domestic demand and HiSilicon silicon.
What falling smartphone shipments actually cost you
Counterpoint names memory as the most significant constraint, with chipset prices adding pressure on top — the same squeeze that has already shown up in Europe’s shipment numbers and in device price increases at retail. What is new here is the firm’s description of how vendors are reacting: by raising prices, cutting lower-margin configurations, and concentrating resources behind fewer products and priority markets.
Unpack that sentence and it is a fairly specific warning about the next 18 months of buying a phone. Cutting lower-margin configurations means the cheap storage and RAM variants get deleted from the price list, so the entry point into a series creeps upward without the phone itself being called more expensive. Concentrating on priority markets means a device launched in one region may never reach yours at all, or arrives months later in a single high-margin configuration. Counterpoint also expects manufacturers to respond by trimming memory configurations, reusing older platforms, raising prices or discontinuing products outright — in plain terms, some of what you buy in 2027 will be last year’s chipset in this year’s shell.
None of that is presented as a temporary blip. Counterpoint’s recovery scenario is 2028, at around 4.8% growth, with shipments only returning toward 2024–2025 levels late in the decade as 6G devices arrive. If you were waiting for prices to settle before upgrading, this forecast argues the opposite: the cheapest version of the phone you want is more likely to disappear than to get cheaper.
