Samsung Retakes No.1 as Phone Shipments Fall 14%

A shrinking market, a rising leader

Counterpoint Research's latest outlook is grim for the smartphone industry as a whole: global shipments are projected to fall 14% year over year. Double-digit contraction is rare — even the early pandemic shock and the 2022 demand cliff didn't hit that hard in most quarters.

Yet Samsung is expected to reclaim the No.1 spot by unit shipments in the middle of that downturn. The reason is the unexpectedly strong reception of its foldable line. Preorders for the Galaxy Z Fold8 series reached 1.44 million units in Korea through December 3 — the highest preorder figure for any Samsung smartphone ever. (In Korea, carriers and Samsung run a formal multi-week preorder window before launch, so these numbers are closely tracked as an early demand signal.)

Overseas signals point the same way. In Southeast Asia and Oceania, combined preorders for the Fold8 and Fold8 Ultra jumped 60% over the previous generation, and Counterpoint's read of global Galaxy Z preorders showed a gain of more than 30% versus last year's model.

Why this is happening now

The contraction isn't a demand story — it's a supply-side cost shock. The AI data-center buildout has sent DRAM and NAND demand soaring, memory prices have climbed sharply, and handset makers are absorbing the hit. When component costs rise, a phone maker has two options: raise prices, or thin out the cheap end of the lineup. Both reduce unit volume.

The pain lands hardest in the budget tier. Chinese vendors that push enormous volumes of $100–$200 devices in India, Southeast Asia and Latin America have thin margins and little room to absorb higher bill-of-materials costs. Samsung, by contrast, earns fat margins on premium foldables and — crucially — makes its own memory. That vertical integration means the same cost shock lands very differently on its books, since higher DRAM prices are simultaneously a headwind for its handset division and a tailwind for its semiconductor division.

How this differs from Apple

Counterpoint expects Apple to weather component inflation reasonably well too, thanks to premium pricing power and a customer base that tolerates price increases. But the unit-shipment race is a different game. Apple has essentially no high-volume budget tier, which caps how much it can rebound on a units basis when the market shrinks. Samsung covers everything from the entry-level A series to $2,000 foldables. It's worth being precise here: this is a unit-volume crown, not a profit crown — Apple continues to take the lion's share of industry operating profit.

Foldables have graduated from experiment to flagship

When the first Galaxy Fold shipped in 2019, the category was closer to an engineering showcase than a product line. Hinge durability, the visible display crease, and a price near $2,000 kept it niche. Preorder volumes were measured in the low hundreds of thousands.

The 1.44 million figure suggests the trajectory has genuinely changed. Several factors likely converged: hardware has stabilized across generations, carrier subsidies and trade-in programs have narrowed the effective price gap with conventional flagships, and on-device AI features arguably deliver more visible value on a large unfolded display than on a 6-inch slab.

The competitive field has also broken Samsung's way. Huawei is formidable inside China but constrained in global distribution. Google's and Motorola's foldables ship in limited markets and volumes. In practical terms, Samsung is the only foldable maker with worldwide retail and carrier reach, and this preorder cycle reflects that.

What actually changes for buyers

The most concrete consequence is upward price pressure. If memory prices keep climbing, next year's flagships may arrive with higher launch prices or smaller base storage tiers — the quieter way of passing costs along. For anyone holding an aging phone, the calculus is whether to stretch the current device further or upgrade before pricing resets.

Budget buyers should expect fewer choices. When entry models stop clearing margin hurdles, vendors quietly retire them, thinning the $150–$300 shelf. The flip side is that the refurbished and secondhand market may become relatively more attractive.

For industry watchers, the useful reframe is that No.1 in a 14% down market is defense, not growth. The real test is conversion: how much of this preorder momentum turns into full-year sell-through and operating margin, and how the memory division's windfall offsets the handset division's cost squeeze at the group level.

The takeaway

This isn't simply a story about a well-received new phone. It's a case study in what happens when component economics — not consumer taste — reshuffle the finished-goods market, and in the structural advantage held by a company that makes both the chips and the devices. Whether foldables have truly reached scale won't be settled by preorder headlines; it will be answered by sell-through data over the next two or three quarters.