Foldables Are Now One in Five Samsung Flagships Sold, and Tier 3 India Is Doing the Lifting

If you want the Samsung foldable strategy in India explained without the marketing gloss, the most revealing thing said in London this month was not a spec. Sitting down with Gadget Bridge around the eighth-generation Galaxy Z launch, JB Park, CEO and President of Samsung Southwest Asia, said the company has spent roughly the last eight months absorbing memory component costs rather than passing them straight to buyers, and that the resulting hit to Samsung’s 2026 numbers is, in his words, “humongous.”

That is not the kind of thing executives usually volunteer. It also happens to be the single most useful piece of context for anyone trying to understand why phone prices look the way they do right now.

Why memory is the villain of 2026

Here is the short version, no jargon. The world’s memory chips are being hoovered up by AI data centres. The three companies that make almost all of it have shifted capacity towards high-bandwidth memory for AI accelerators, because that is where the margin lives. Conventional DRAM and NAND flash, the stuff inside your phone, is what is left over. Contract prices have climbed at rates the industry has not seen in decades, forecasts point to elevated pricing well into 2027, and every handset maker on earth is now doing arithmetic it does not enjoy.

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Park did not dodge it. He described memory prices as going “beyond everyone’s expectations,” triggered by big tech firms pouring money into AI infrastructure on the logic that falling behind now means being irrelevant for thirty years. He was blunt about the timeline too, saying prices will keep surging for a year or two, and calling that a fact rather than a forecast.

His argument for absorbing the cost is a philosophical one. A phone is not petrol. You buy fuel and burn it, so volatile pricing is tolerable. You buy a smartphone and live with it for three years, which makes sudden price jumps feel like a betrayal. Samsung’s increments, he claimed, have been smaller than rivals’ because of that absorption.

The EMI sleight of hand, explained honestly

In the US and Europe, carriers subsidise handsets through monthly plans. India has no such cushion. Park’s point was that an EMI has two moving parts, the device cost and the interest, and Samsung is picking up the interest side for 24 to 30 months even on flagships. He also pointed at the Galaxy Forever platform, which bundles no-cost EMIs with assured buyback and a no-questions-asked upgrade or return.

Read it plainly and it is a financing story dressed as a pricing story. Read it charitably, and it is the only lever available when the bill of materials refuses to behave.

Is a cheaper foldable finally coming?

The most newsworthy hedge of the session. Asked directly about a sub-1,000-dollar foldable for tier 2 and tier 3 India, Park noted that the S series has a Fan Edition to lower the entry price, and that eight generations in, the Z series still does not.

Then came the door, left deliberately ajar. If foldables get democratised, if more brands pile in, and if consumers ask for it, an FE foldable is “a possibility that can happen.” That is not a launch date. In executive dialect, it is closer to a yes than most people will realise.

Galaxy AI, free until you get greedy

This was the clearest articulation yet of where Galaxy AI subscription pro features are heading. Park’s framing was tiered rather than paywalled.

• On-device AI stays embedded in the price of the phone, and Samsung absorbs the compute cost, including the data centre and GPU spend behind heavier features like photo and video editing.
• The basic tier stays free, and Park estimates around 90 per cent of users will never need more than that.
• Cloud-based, partner-powered AI is tokenised, and tokens cost real money.
• Professional workloads, the architect or the editor doing heavy lifting, would sit behind a monthly subscription on the partner’s cloud platform rather than Samsung’s own Galaxy AI.

He also stressed that older flagships are not abandoned, with AI modules pushed back to N-1, N-2 and N-3 generations. Combined with seven years of OS upgrades, that is a longevity pitch aimed squarely at buyers spooked by rising prices.

Tier 3 India is not the budget market anymore

The stat worth stapling to a wall. Roughly 65 per cent of Samsung’s flagship sales in India come from tier 2, tier 3 and rural markets, and those markets are growing in double digits, faster than the metros. Distribution does the work here, with shipments to 18,000 postal codes, more than 80,000 mom and pop stores, and about 20,000 promoters on the ground.

Foldables, meanwhile, now account for more than 20 per cent of Samsung’s flagship sales globally, up year on year from a 2019 debut Park remembers mostly for neighbours asking whether the folding was real.

What Noida and Bengaluru actually built

Asked about Indian developer support for the Fold8’s new aspect ratio, Park pivoted to something more concrete. A feature called Pay Now, arriving inside Now Brief on the new foldables, will be exclusive to Indian users. Built by Indian engineers off local insight, it reads upcoming bill reminders and nudges you to pay through Samsung Wallet before a late fee lands.

It is a small feature with a big signal attached. Park was explicit that hardware architecture still originates in Korea while India contributes software, AI and consumer persona research, and that his ambition for the three Indian R&D centres is intellectual property rather than headcount. Partnerships with IITs and startups sit alongside that.

No family discount from the chip division

The best answer of the roundtable was also the driest. Asked whether Samsung’s mobile business gets favourable treatment from Samsung’s own semiconductor arm during a shortage, Park described a wall between the Device Experience and Device Solutions divisions that is “getting higher.” The chip business chases the best fit for its own numbers, internal or not. They compete for volume and pricing like strangers.

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He also said something rivals rarely say. He does not want the competition to collapse, because healthy competition drives innovation. His line about being alone on an island, unable to tell whether you are smart or dumb without hundreds of people challenging you, was the most quotable moment of the hour.

Crease, code and the copying problem

On Chinese brands undercutting on price, Park’s view was that undercutting has stopped working in a year when everyone is bleeding on materials. His differentiation argument rests on the unglamorous parts. Anyone can build something slimmer or lighter. Durability is harder. Reducing the crease is harder. Optimising the OS and app behaviour for a folding aspect ratio, work Samsung has done with its platform partner for eight years, is hardest of all.

On the TriFold, he was refreshingly candid. It makes no economic sense. Samsung shipped it to plant a flag, and he expects rollables or a more affordable tri-fold to follow once component costs catch up.

Final Words

Roundtables usually produce corporate wallpaper. This one produced three genuinely useful admissions. Samsung is absorbing a memory shock it expects to last another two years, Galaxy AI will eventually split into free and professional tiers even if Samsung insists the paid part belongs to a partner, and a Fan Edition foldable is no longer a silly question. The Fold8 Ultra’s titanium display stack and silicon carbon battery will get the reviews, but the more consequential story is a market where innovation and affordability are being pulled in opposite directions by a chip shortage nobody in the phone industry created. Park’s bet is that value, meaning three years of a device that still feels worth what you paid, beats the sticker price. In an India where tier 3 buyers are now buying flagships, that bet is more sensible than it sounds.