India's smartphone market hit by massive price hikes: Vivo, Samsung, Oppo rates jump up to 40%.

Between US President Donald Trump’s war in west Asia and a chip shortage triggered by Nvidia’s focus on supplying artificial intelligence (AI) memory chips, India’s top three smartphone brands Vivo, Oppo and Samsung, as well as Realme, Xiaomi and Nothing have emerged as the first casualties in a once-thriving market—increasing smartphone prices by as much as 40% across their portfolios.The price hikes are significant: smartphones make for India’s single-largest electronics category, with sales of over $43 billion through 2025. Since the pandemic in 2021, India has struggled to revive its smartphone market due to a stagnation of new features and an increasingly saturated market.While companies so far managed single-digit revenue growth on the back of rising premium phone sales, the current market conditions come as a double whammy: consumers are putting phone purchases on the backburner due to rising prices of basic needs such as cooking gas even as the rise in prices does nothing to aid the ailing market.Vivo, Samsung and Oppo accounted for 47% of the 152 million smartphones sold in the country last year, according to data from market researcher International Data Corp.

(IDC) India. Taking Realme and Xiaomi into account, these five brands represent two-thirds of all smartphones sold in India every year—thus making the price hikes sweeping and significant.Emails about the price increases show that the hikes are sweeping, said retailers across India who received them over the past one month, requesting anonymity since they were not authorized to share the information.

Mint has seen copies of the emails that retailers received announcing the price hikes. Vivo, Samsung and Oppo did not immediately respond to Mint’s emailed