Why Samsung may welcome Apple’s most expensive iPhone yet

Samsung Electronics may have an unlikely reason to welcome Apple’s first foldable i Phone: The more Apple charges for it, the less shocking Samsung’s own prices will look. Ahead of Samsung’s expected unveiling of its Galaxy Z Fold 8 series in London in late July, its mobile business is walking into a hard launch. Memory and processor costs are climbing, leaks point to higher Galaxy prices, and Apple, absent from the category for years, is expected to enter in September with what could be the most expensive iPhone ever made. Nabila Popal, senior research director at International Data Corporation (IDC), told The Korea Herald she expects Samsung to raise flagship foldable prices this year by about $100, and still to stay “significantly lower” than Apple’s first foldable, which IDC sees arriving near a “massive sticker price of $2,500”. That hands Samsung something it rarely gets from Apple: pricing cover. But cover is the only thing getting easier. The same cost shock is squeezing Samsung’s margins, and Apple is arriving as a third front after Motorola in the US and Huawei in China against a lead Samsung is already struggling to hold. The cost shock reaches Apple The pressure is no longer theoretical. Apple Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Tim Cook recently told The Wall Street Journal that price increases were “unavoidable” as memory and storage costs surged, in a shock he likened to a “hundred-year flood.” Popal was not surprised. With memory costs roughly tripling this year, no vendor can absorb them. What surprised her was the timing. The CEO saying it before launch, in her view, was “a deliberate and smart move” by Apple to get buyers used to the idea. Samsung has no such room to manage the message, and the squeeze is already in its numbers. Its mobile division’s operating profit fell 35 per cent in the first quarter from a year earlier, even with strong Galaxy S26 sales, because component costs rose faster than prices could follow. Some Korean analysts now project t