Allocation decides who ships. Price is secondary. That is the line from three independent phone and laptop makers in a Reuters report dated September 16, 2026. The memory squeeze they describe is not a short spike. They plan around it lasting through 2027.
Fairphone CEO Raymond van Eck put it flatly. “If you don’t have allocation, you’re out of the game anyhow.” The Dutch repairable-phone maker is one of the smaller brands that cannot buy their way to the front of the queue the way a top OEM can.
Memory near 60% of a $400 BOM
Van Eck told Reuters that memory can account for almost 60% of the bill of materials on handsets priced around $400. Tom’s Hardware carried the same figure the same day. That share is far above what mid-range phones carried when DRAM was cheap. It also sits next to earlier industry notes that already put 2026 smartphone shipments on a roughly 14% decline track as memory costs bite.
Photo: Apple
SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung said in July that 2027 would be “the worst year in the industry’s history from the supply perspective,” with demand outstripping capacity beyond 2030. Reuters repeats that line in the September piece. The memory maker did not publish a new wafer-start number with that quote. The binding claim is the timeline, not a fresh unit forecast.
Contract price rise cools; shortage does not
TrendForce expects conventional DRAM contract prices up 13% to 18% this quarter. That is far below the 93% to 98% jump it tracked in the first quarter. The rally slows. The shortage does not. Jolla CEO Sami Pienimäki said the firm’s combined storage and DRAM package peaked at the end of March and has held since. Spring forecasts that prices would double again by autumn did not land for that company. He still expects supply to normalise only from 2028.
That sits beside yesterday’s TrendForce revision that lifted 2026 phone production to 1.07 billion on early buys. The research house framed that lift as borrowed demand, not a recovery. Small makers without Apple-scale LTAs feel the same squeeze from the other side of the table.
Two boards, fake-chip tests, salvaged modules
Jolla, the Finnish handset maker founded by former Nokia engineers, designed two motherboard variants. One takes a combined package. The other takes discrete chips. The swap lets the factory follow whichever part is actually available. The company also stress-tests samples from every batch. Pienimäki said sellers push refurbished parts as new when prices spike.
Photo: Apple
Framework, the U.S. repairable-laptop maker, already ships modular memory. Customers can fit modules salvaged from older machines. CEO Nirav Patel said late last year everyone tried to grab inventory at once, which deepened the shortage. Unable to afford a stockpile, Framework places non-cancellable orders well ahead without knowing final price, timing, or volume. That is a different risk profile from Samsung’s latest round of 7–10% hike talks on phone DRAM and NAND, where scale still buys a seat at the table.
How costs get passed on
Each firm handles the bill differently. Framework reprices quickly when costs land. Jolla added a paid memory upgrade. Fairphone has not raised prices at all, according to the Reuters interviews. None of the three claimed a new long-term supply deal with Samsung, SK Hynix, or Micron in the piece.
Counterpoint Research’s June forecast, cited again by Reuters, put 2026 smartphone shipments at 1.08 billion units, down 13.9% year over year. That is close to TrendForce’s production math and still points the wrong way for entry-level builds. Apple’s own flagship cycle, including early access to advanced foundry capacity discussed in the Samsung–Qualcomm 2nm talks while Apple holds early TSMC slots, sits in a different allocation tier. The Reuters story is about the brands that fall outside that tier.
Source: Reuters, Sep. 16, 2026; Tom’s Hardware; TrendForce; Counterpoint Research; SK Hynix CEO remarks (July)
