Xiaomi's 80,000-unit foldable sidesteps the memory squeeze

A sellout week, on Chinese silicon

Open sales of the Xiaomi 18 Fold began on 10 September, and 36,000 units left shelves the first day. By day seven the count stood at 80,000, a company record for a foldable↗, and Xiaomi said stock had run out ². The detail that matters to the memory market sits next to the processor: 16GB of LPDDR6, the first mass-produced generation from ChangXin Memory Technologies, paired with Xiaomi's in-house XRing O3 chip ¹³.

The squeeze everyone else is paying

Samsung, SK hynix and Micron control more than 90% of global DRAM ⁴, and SK hynix chief executive Kwak Noh-Jung says the shortage will persist through 2030↗ ⁵. LPDDR5X contract prices jumped 78–83% in the second quarter alone↗ ⁴. A California class action alleges the three drove conventional DRAM up about 700% since 2022; Micron denies it ⁶. At the launch, Lei Jun conceded that memory is currently expensive ³.

One flagship outside the queue

Two of the phone's most strategic parts, its processor and its memory, come from Chinese vendors rather than the usual Qualcomm-plus-Samsung pairing ¹³. Owning the SoC hands Xiaomi the memory controller, the frequency profile and the power tuning, where a buyer of merchant silicon gets a datasheet ³.

Apple already designs its own silicon, so its squeeze is memory-side only. It raised Mac and iPad prices in June over component costs ⁶, and reports point to a $100–200 bump for the iPhone 18 ⁷. Its one visible exit, testing CXMT chips for devices sold in China, draws pushback in Washington ⁴.

Fast challenger, small print

CXMT went from mass-producing LPDDR5X in October 2025 to shipping LPDDR6 in under a year: a package rated at 12,800Mbps that runs at 10,667Mbps beside the O3 ¹³. First-half revenue hit 150.3 billion yuan, up 874%, with 77.6 billion yuan of net profit↗ ¹⁸.

The caveats are just as concrete. Reuters, as reported by The Korea Herald↗, puts Xiaomi's shipment target for the whole run at about 200,000 to 300,000 units, and Xiaomi has never said CXMT is the sole supplier ⁸. SK hynix finished its own 16-gigabit LPDDR6 in March, with Xiaomi reportedly among its first customers ⁸.

Volume, not another first

CXMT's newer claims, a fifth-generation platform with at least 50% more dies per wafer↗ and parity with the industry's best nodes, are company-claimed, and yields are unpublished ⁹¹⁰. Nobody outside the company has measured the parts against Samsung, SK hynix or Micron ¹⁰.

The tell is volume. The watch item is whether LPDDR6 spreads from one showcase foldable into the PCs, vehicles and edge servers on CXMT's roadmap, and whether Lei Jun gets the wider Chinese component pairing he predicts ³¹¹.

Acer chief executive Jason Chen takes the other side of the 2030 bet: "It is impossible for the shortage to last until 2030" ¹⁰. The oligopoly priced memory like nobody could leave the table; the 18 Fold just walked partway out, on memory, with 80,000 buyers behind it.