SEOUL, Feb 26 - Samsung Electronics introduced its Galaxy S26 flagship smartphones on Thursday, announcing higher price points for certain models in the United States and South Korea as rising memory chip costs put pressure on device margins.
The new S26 family incorporates external AI capabilities from Perplexity along with Google’s Gemini and an upgraded Bixby assistant. The rollout follows Samsung’s loss of the top smartphone position last year to Apple, which saw strong iPhone demand in China and India.
Samsung warned last month of a worsening chip shortage driven by the AI boom. The company said buoyant memory demand has supported its core chip business even as the same dynamic is creating headwinds for its smartphone and display units.
Global investments by companies such as Meta, Google and Microsoft to build AI infrastructure have consumed much of available memory supply. That shift has sent memory prices higher as chipmakers give priority to higher-margin data centre components, including high-bandwidth memory chips, over components destined for consumer devices.
For pricing, Samsung set the base Galaxy S26 at $899 in the United States, an increase of 4.7% from the preceding model. The S26 Plus was priced at $1,099, up 10%, while the list price for the S26 Ultra remained unchanged. In South Korea, the company raised the price of the base model by 8.6%.
Samsung also equipped some S26 variants with its own Exynos processors after using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips for the S25. Analysts said the move could bolster Samsung’s chip design business and help mobile margins.
Samsung stated that the S26 Ultra will feature what the company describes as the industry’s first built-in mobile privacy display, which narrows side viewing angles to limit off-axis viewing. The company plans to begin rolling out the S26 series on March 11.
Market tracker TrendForce projected a sharp rise in conventional DRAM contract prices, expecting a 90% to 95% surge in the January to March period of this year compared with the final three months of 2025.
On a post-earnings conference call in January, Apple CEO Tim Cook said he expected memory chip prices to increase sharply, but he declined to answer analysts’ questions about whether Apple would respond by raising its own product prices.
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