Memory chip crunch set to drive up smartphone prices

By AFP
November 20, 2025


While AI-led demand is surging, chip-makers are also winding back spending on capacity, which is keeping prices elevated - Copyright AFP STR

Katie Forster

Shoppers could face higher prices for phones, laptops and other gadgets next year, manufacturers and analysts warn, as AI data centres hoover up memory chips used in consumer electronics.

The world’s biggest tech companies are ploughing head-spinningly huge sums into building the hardware that powers artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT.

Their insatiable demand is snarling up a supply chain kept tight on purpose by chipmakers who are keen to avoid price drops that dent profits, experts say.

In 2026, supply chain pressure for memory chips “will be far greater than this year”, Lu Weibing, president of Chinese electronics giant Xiaomi, said this week.

“Everyone will likely observe that retail prices for products will see a significant increase,” he told an earnings call.

William Keating, head of semiconductor and tech consulting firm Ingenuity, expects the same.

“All companies that manufacture PCs, smartphones, servers etc will be impacted by the shortage,” Keating told AFP.

“End result: consumers will pay more.”

In high demand are key chips known as DRAM and storage components called NAND, which are found in everyday gadgets but are also needed to help process the vast amounts of data crunched by generative AI.

That’s driving up memory chip prices, which in turn is turbocharging revenue for the firms that produce them such as South Korea’s Samsung and SK hynix, and Micron and SanDisk in the United States.

“AI-related server demand keeps growing, and this demand significantly exceeds industry supply,” Kim Jae-june of Samsung Electronics said last month.

– ‘Keep prices high’ –

Samsung said Sunday that it plans to build a new semiconductor plant in South Korea to meet the soaring demand, while SK hynix recently reported its best-ever quarterly performance, “driven by the full-scale rise in prices of DRAM and NAND”.

Industry analysts TrendForce have lowered their 2026 global production forecasts for smartphones and notebook laptops.

“The memory industry has begun a robust upward pricing cycle,” which “forces downstream brands to hike retail prices,” TrendForce said.

Cars may also be affected, although Keating noted that a smaller portion of their tech relies on memory chips.

Last week China’s largest contract chipmaker SMIC said customers were hesitant to place orders owing to uncertainty over how many phones, cars, or other products the memory chip industry can supply.

The cause of the shortage is two-fold.

AI-driven demand is greater than anticipated, but memory chip makers have also been “drastically cutting” spending on expanding capacity in recent years, Keating explained.

“Keep capacity tight, keep prices high is basically their mantra,” he said.

“They’ve done this deliberately to ensure that there’s no repeat of the most recent memory price collapse, which cost the memory makers tens of billions in losses.”

Price jumps for memory chips “are huge and the trend is continuing”, said Stephen Wu, founder of the Carthage Capital investment fund.

“Consumers and enterprises should expect higher memory prices, longer lead times, and more take-or-pay contracts through at least early 2026,” Wu said.

burs-kaf/dan

Smartphone sharing demands a new approach to cybersecurity

 Does your partner know the password to your phone? Probably. A study by Griffith University researchers reveals that 70 per cent of Australians share access to their phone with their partner, despite dominant cybersecurity guidelines 

Griffith University

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70% share access

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Credit: ACCAN

 

A study by Griffith University researchers reveals that 70 per cent of Australians share access to their phone with their partner, despite dominant cybersecurity guidelines advising the opposite.

Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Molly Dragiewicz, who led the study with Dr Jeffrey Ackerman and research assistant Marianne Haaland, said the most common reasons for smartphone sharing were positive, but that does not guard against negative impacts.

“People usually share for convenience, out of trust, and to help each other,” Professor Dragiewicz said.

“However, if one partner turns out to be abusive later on, shared access can be dangerous.”

In fact, 20 per cent of identity theft perpetrators identified by Australian police are current or former intimate partners or individuals related to an ex-partner.

In addition, technology-facilitated abuse is a common component of coercive control.

The report’s findings show that younger people are more likely to share, suggesting this is a growing issue. 

Professor Dragiewicz argues that the one-user/one-device threat model created for commercial and government contexts is inadequate for addressing interpersonal cybersecurity risks.

Phone and app design can help to reduce the risks by using Safety by Design, as recommended by the Australia’s eSafety Commissioner.

“Cybersecurity advice and design based on not sharing your device or credentials are a really bad fit with how people actually use their phone.

The first step in Safety by Design is understanding how technology is used in real life,” Professor Dragiewicz said.

The study was made possible by a grant from the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN).

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Method of Research

Survey

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

SMARTPHONESHARING WITH INTIMATE PARTNERS: Implications for telecommunications consumer cybersecurity

Article Publication Date

18-Nov-2025

85% past year sharing with partner

Privacy behaviours bar chart

Most people lock their phones

I trust him wth my life

Credit

ACCAN

 

Enhancing bookkeeper decision support through graph representation learning for bank reconciliation

KeAi Communications Co., Ltd.

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Most graph-based models and variants (red, purple) outperform BERT (yellow) with higher mean model performance (y-axis) and lower standard deviation of model performance (x-axis) across repeated training runs.

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Credit: Justin Munoz.

Bank reconciliation is an essential part of maintaining the financial health of a business, requiring bookkeepers to match incoming bank statement lines to invoices. For large businesses that process thousands of records, it is both time‑consuming and tedious, which is why many rely on automated tools that suggest likely matches for bookkeepers to confirm. While these tools work reasonably well for simple one-to-one matches, they often perform poorly when a single payment needs to be reconciled against multiple invoices (one-to-many matches).

In a new study published in The Journal of Finance and Data Science, a team of Australian researchers explored whether graph representation learning could improve the accuracy of match suggestions in these scenarios.

"Instead of modelling each transaction in isolation, a system could leverage a network mapping out the entire general ledger, where each historical record and its reconciliation are represented as a node and edge in a graph." shares Justin Munoz, lead author of the study. "New records can then be added to this graph, transformed into numerical representations or embeddings, and fed into a downstream machine learning model that scores the match likelihood for any pair of records."

Trained and evaluated on three years of real‑world bookkeeping data, the graph‑based method was shown to significantly improve match accuracy, outperforming an industry standard, with the largest gains on one-to-many matches. The researchers attributed these gains to higher-quality embeddings that capture both the structural properties of the ledger graph and the contextual information contained in transactions.

Further, the team found that graph-based models exhibited much lower prediction instability than other non-graph embedding methods such as Google's BERT, a popular language model. In this context, prediction instability refers to variation in model performance when a model is retrained multiple times. As shown in Figure 1, the best models cluster in the top-left region of high accuracy and low prediction instability.

“For high‑risk domains such as finance and accounting, stability matters just as much as accuracy.” adds Munoz. “Our findings highlight a promising direction for accounting technology that bookkeepers can rely on in day‑to‑day work, improving both trust and reliability.”

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Contact the author: Justin Munoz, School of Engineering, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, justin.munoz@rmit.edu.au

The publisher KeAi was established by Elsevier and China Science Publishing & Media Ltd to unfold quality research globally. In 2013, our focus shifted to open access publishing. We now proudly publish more than 200 world-class, open access, English language journals, spanning all scientific disciplines. Many of these are titles we publish in partnership with prestigious societies and academic institutions, such as the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC).

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Journal

The Journal of Finance and Data Science

DOI

10.1016/j.jfds.2025.100170 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Enhancing Bookkeeper Decision Support Through Graph Representation Learning for Bank Reconciliation

 

Filipinos eating more but growing less

Stagnant farms linked to widening rice gap

Ateneo de Manila University

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In the ten years leading up to 2023, total production of palay (unmilled rice) grew just 9 percent, from 18.4 to 20.1 million metric tons, even as rice consumption and the population itself continued to rise. Rice farmland barely expanded, increasing by just 1 percent (from 4.7 to 4.8 million hectares), while average yields improved by only 7 percent, from 3.9 to 4.2 metric tons per hectare.

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Credit: Bartelet et al, 2025

As of 2022 alone, Filipinos were eating 2.3 million metric tons more rice than the country produced—an 18 percent shortfall that has locked the Philippines into deeper dependence on imported rice despite years of government programs to boost local harvests.

This widening gap is the focus of new research from Ateneo de Manila University’s John Gokongwei School of Management and Department of Environmental Science. They found that national rice output has been largely stagnant since 2017, based on data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA).

In the ten years leading up to 2023, total production of palay (unmilled rice) grew just 9 percent, from 18.4 to 20.1 million metric tons, even as rice consumption and the population itself continued to rise. Rice farmland barely expanded, increasing by just 1 percent (from 4.7 to 4.8 million hectares), while average yields improved by only 7 percent, from 3.9 to 4.2 metric tons per hectare.

The myth of urbanization

Contrary to the common belief that urbanization encroaches on farmland and takes away farmland resources, the researchers did not find strong evidence that city expansion alone explains farmland stagnation. Instead, they point to a combination of limited farmland expansion, slow yield growth, climate shocks, and uneven public investment in rice areas as the main constraints on domestic production.

This is borne out by sharp regional contrasts that emerged from the data. On the one hand, from 2018 to 2023, the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) and Eastern Visayas (Region VIII) saw rice production decline by 15 percent and 11 percent, respectively, largely due to rice farmland loss; stagnant yields; repeated typhoons and droughts; and competition as farmers divert land use to other, more profitable crops. 

And yet, on the other hand, the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) increased its rice output by 40 percent, while Cagayan Valley (Region II) and Ilocos (Region I) posted gains of 27 percent and 16 percent, respectively. These gains are linked to expanding irrigated areas, better yields, and support programs such as improved seed, farm mechanization, and targeted regional initiatives. 

Moreover, seed programs to help ensure robust crops and mechanization aid towards improving rice harvesting and processing have helped boost yield, while infrastructure expansion and regional government policies have helped with farmland expansion. In the particular case of the BARMM, increased rice yields are linked to dedicated investments in rice infrastructure on top of peace dividends in the wake of improved political stability in the region.

Better infrastructure and support needed

Despite the establishment and subsequent extension until 2031 of the Rice Competitiveness Enhancement Fund (RCEF) under the Rice Tariffication Law (RA 11203), the authors note that national programs alone have not been enough to lift productivity in lagging regions. 

The successes of the BARMM, Cagayan Valley, and Ilocos may provide insights toward boosting rice production in other regions; and the experiences from less successful regions may give lessons toward avoiding the same declines elsewhere. Closing the country’s growing rice deficit will require regionally tailored, climate-resilient strategies: stronger irrigation systems, better-targeted support services, and financial measures that lower farmers’ costs, according to the Ateneo researchers. The researchers expressed optimism that, with the right complement of policies and investments, local rice production can still grow and help narrow the country’s dependence on imported grain.

Henry A. Bartelet, Alenn Jhulia D. Prodigalidad, Janelle S. Dy, and Jan Gabriel N. Manzano published their paper, Understanding rice production stagnation in the Philippines: Regional evidence and development implications, in the open-access journal PLOS One.

 

For interview requests and other inquiries, please email media.research@ateneo.edu. Visit archium.ateneo.edu for more information about our latest research and innovations.

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Journal

PLOS One

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0335344 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Understanding rice production stagnation in the Philippines: Regional evidence and development implications

Eating alone linked to poorer nutrition in older adults

Flinders University

Older adults who regularly eat meals alone are more likely to experience poorer nutrition and health outcomes than those who share meals with others, new research by Flinders University has found.

The systematic review, published in the journal Appetite, collated findings from 20 international studies examining the relationship between eating alone and measurable health outcomes among community-living adults aged 65 years and over.

The research found consistent associations between eating alone and poorer diet quality, reduced intake of key food groups such as fruit, vegetables and meat, and an increased risk of weight loss and frailty.

Lead author Caitlin Wyman, an Accredited Practising Dietitian and PhD candidate in Flinders’ Caring Futures Institute, says the findings highlight the importance of social connections for older people, especially at mealtimes.

“Food is more than the nutritional benefit it provides. Sharing a meal is an important social activity that can influence appetite, dietary variety, and overall wellbeing,” says Ms Wyman, from Flinders’ College of Nursing and Health Sciences.

“We knew from previous research that feelings of loneliness and social isolation can contribute to reduced food intake, but we had yet to explore the nutritional and physical outcomes of older adults eating alone versus with others.”

Drawing on data from over 80,000 older adults across 12 countries, the review revealed that the social setting of eating can have wide-ranging impacts.
 
While a small number of studies found no difference in nutritional outcomes, the majority showed that eating alone was linked to poorer food choices and lower intake of protein-rich foods, which are important for maintenance of muscle and functional ability. 

Some studies also found that eating alone was associated with a greater likelihood of weight loss and an elevated risk of frailty.

The authors say these findings point to mealtime behaviour as a potentially modifiable risk factor for poor nutrition in older age, amongst Australia’s ageing population.

“We know that ageing brings physiological changes such as reduced hunger cues and altered taste, but our findings suggest that social factors are equally important,” says Ms Wyman.

“Eating together fosters connection, enjoyment and nourishment. Encouraging opportunities for shared meals, whether that’s with family, friends, or community programs, could help improve food intake, nutritional status and quality of life for older adults living at home.”

Co-author and Flinders University researcher and Accredited Practising Dietitian Dr Alison Yaxley says the review supports integrating social and nutritional screening into routine aged care and primary healthcare practices.

“Simple questions about mealtime habits could help identify people at higher nutritional risk,” says Dr Yaxley, from the College of Nursing and Health Sciences. 

“By recognising the link between social isolation and nutrition, health professionals can connect older adults with community meal programs or social dining opportunities that have the potential to make a real difference.”

The authors suggest that community-based initiatives, such as neighbourhood meal groups, intergenerational dining programs, or local café partnerships, could help reduce the prevalence of eating alone among older Australians. 

“The recent aged care reforms present a great opportunity to integrate food and nutrition into home-based aged care in Australia and optimise the nutritional status and overall health of the growing number of older adults living in our community,” says Ms Wyman. 

Further research is needed to explore what strategies can best encourage regular shared meals in this population and how they can be best implemented.

The paper, ‘Associations between nutritional and physical outcomes of community-dwelling older adults eating alone versus with others: A systematic review’ by Caitlin Wyman, Jolene Thomas, Michael Lawless and Alison Yaxley, is published in Appetite. DOI: 10.1016/j.appet.2025.108327
 

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Journal

Appetite

DOI

10.1016/j.appet.2025.108327 

Method of Research

Systematic review

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Associations between nutritional and physical outcomes of community-dwelling older adults eating alone versus with others: A systematic review