Memory crunch: Chinese tablet makers Xiaomi and Honor raise prices as chip costs surge

Chinese tablet makers, including Xiaomi and Honor, have raised prices across their product lines as they scrambled to absorb soaring costs of memory chips.

Xiaomi, the Beijing-based smartphone and electric vehicle maker, has imposed mark-ups of 100 yuan (US$14) to 300 yuan on several tablet products this week, including its entry-level Redmi Pad 2 and the premium Xiaomi Pad 8 series.

The Redmi Pad 2, launched in June this year with a starting price of 999 yuan, now carries a price tag of 1,199 yuan for the base model. The Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro now sells for 4,099 yuan, 200 yuan more than its September launch price.

Honor, the spin-off handset brand from Huawei Technologies, has already started to adjust prices of its tablet products, said Lin Lin, head of smart life business at Honor China, in a post on social media platform Weibo on Tuesday.

Lin added that industries reliant on random access memory (RAM) and read-only memory (ROM) are under pressure to raise prices.

Devices such as smartphones, tablets and personal computers (PC) need RAM to run apps and internal storage to save data. These components rely on dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips and NAND flash chips, which are both experiencing sharp price hikes.