January 28 news: At noon today, Omdia released its latest research, "Smartphone Display Market Insights," pointing out that in 2026, global smartphone AMOLED panel shipments are expected to fall to 810 million units, down from 817 million units in 2025. This will be the first decline in AMOLED shipments after three consecutive years of growth.
According to the report, the main reason for the decline is the memory supply shortage and frantic price increases, which have led phone manufacturers to cut their 2026 procurement plans. Memory price increases have now approached or even exceeded the cost of phone display panels, while AMOLED manufacturers already slashed prices sharply in 2025 to compete for market share, leaving little room for substantive concessions in 2026.
The direct cause of the current memory supply shortage and price increases is the surge in demand from AI servers. Memory production capacity is being prioritized for these high-margin products, which in turn has tightened supply across the entire consumer electronics chain, where margins are lower.
The report points out that another overlooked factor is intensifying geopolitical tensions, combined with the United States entering a rate-cutting cycle and a weakening dollar, which attracts more speculative capital into dollar-denominated commodity markets, including gold, silver, copper, and semiconductors.
The combination of the industrial and financial attributes of these products, together with investors' safe-haven and inflation-hedging demand, has further amplified the room for price elasticity. As a result, the pricing of base materials has been revalued, and since these materials sit upstream in the electronics supply chain, imported inflation is thereby transmitted to midstream and downstream manufacturing segments.
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