An industry usually enters winter when it stops wanting to tell stories, not when volumes fall. This year’s Double 11 in China had that quality.
The festival reached its eighteenth year and passed almost in silence. Phone makers normally spend the run-up launching volume models, fighting on price and posting champion banners at midnight. This year the banners did not come. One of the larger consumer technology bloggers noted that ten years ago a single day brought ten e-commerce briefs and this year brought none.
The promotions got smaller as the parts got dearer
Memory is the reason. Contract prices for smartphone memory rose 50 to 80 per cent quarter on quarter in parts of the first half of 2026, according to DIGITIMES. The pace slowed in the second half, but prices stayed 10 to 20 per cent above where they started the year. By the end of 2026 the average selling price of a smartphone on sale globally is expected to be about 20 per cent higher, with newly launched models up as much as 30 per cent year on year.
Platform subsidies and store discounts used to make the festival an obvious buying moment. With subsidies reduced and list prices higher, the old rule that waiting always pays stopped working. A sales assistant in an OPPO store described the pattern plainly: people still come in with a reason to upgrade, but they are not in a hurry. New models are expensive, so they look at old ones. Discounts are thin, so they wait again.
Fifteen per cent is not a promotion problem
IDC puts China’s third-quarter smartphone shipments at about 57.9 million units, down 15.4 per cent year on year. In the first half the decline was around 4 per cent, so the market deteriorated through the year as replacement cycles lengthened.
Brand structure is showing through the averages. On JD’s phone ranking Apple took four of the top five places, with Redmi’s Note 17 Pro holding fifth. One platform’s ranking is not the whole market, and it does not prove Chinese brands have lost competitiveness. It does show that when buyers are cautious, brand strength, product pull and price stability decide the sale. Most of the Chinese models that made the list sit below RMB 2,000, and the gap in value shows up in the totals: Apple led on both units and revenue.
Huawei is the exception. It grew double digits in the third quarter, ranked fourth by units and second by revenue on that same list, and is preparing a sub-brand called OSTA aimed at the value segment the way Honor once was.
The PC is a mirror
Notebooks are in the same position. IDC recorded a 20.1 per cent fall in global PC shipments. Luotu Technology puts China’s third-quarter online notebook sales at 3.12 million units, down 14.0 per cent, and forecasts a 10.7 per cent decline for the full year on the same channel basis.
The price evidence is blunter than the shipment data. Mechrevo’s Jiaolong 16 Pro, a popular gaming laptop, averaged RMB 6,224 on the Dewu platform during the June shopping festival. By the eve of Double 11 the same machine averaged RMB 8,348, up RMB 2,124.92, or 34.1 per cent, in five months. Lenovo’s Xiaoxin Pro 16 with the same 16-inch screen, 1TB of storage and 120Hz panel launched at RMB 5,499 in the previous generation and RMB 7,499 in this one, a rise of about 36 per cent.
Lenovo chief executive Yang Yuanqing has said the memory shortage and the price rise are not short-term, and in August put the tightness lasting into 2027. TrendForce expects a low single-digit decline in global notebook shipments in 2027, widening to high single digits if DRAM and CPU prices stay high and brands pass more cost through.
The AI that raised the bill
The irony is not subtle. This consumer electronics winter is happening in the middle of an AI summer. Two years of messaging told the market that AI was the next growth curve, that phones would go all in on AI and PCs would become AI PCs. What actually happened is that AI raised the cost of the components, and that cost reached the shelf before any AI feature reached a customer’s daily habit.
IDC’s analysts are blunt about the demand side. For most buyers AI is not a purchase criterion. They weigh appearance, price, performance and camera first, and treat AI as a final embellishment, because the situations where they would actively use it are still few. Ecosystem walls between China’s internet giants limit what agent phones can actually do, and phone makers want to own the traffic rather than become a hardware platform for someone else’s model.
Some categories are growing. JD sold more than 50 million AI products across the 11.11 period. Smart glasses GMV rose 318.86 per cent at the price comparison platform SMZDM, and spending on token-related goods rose 127.43 per cent month on month. That is real demand, and it is not yet enough to move a market built on phones and laptops.
IDC expects little improvement in China’s smartphone market in the fourth quarter and continued decline through most of 2027, with cost pressure persisting. The current forecast for a return to stable growth is 2028 at the earliest.
Consumers are absorbing the cost of an AI build-out they have not been given a reason to buy into. The industry spent three years saying AI would sell the next device. So far it has only made the next device more expensive.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Sohu Tech report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://www.sohu.com/a/1100445510_116132.