From Discounting to Surging: How India’s Smartphone Pricing Flipped Between 2025 and 2026

India's smartphone market split into two distinct pricing eras within eighteen months. Through calendar 2025, prices went nowhere; the Techarc price index fell to a trough of 94.9 in September before recovering to exactly 100 by December, leaving the average phone essentially flat (-0.1%) for the year. Then, from January 2026, prices broke sharply upward. In the first five months of 2026 alone, the average launched-in-2025 model rose +7.9%, with the index climbing from 100 to 108.2 by May. The driver is a memory-cost shock passing through to retail. Its…