Motorola and Samsung grow their US prepaid smartphone market shares
The Moto G Series and the Samsung Galaxy A line help the manufacturers hike their prepaid phone sales during Q2.
Motorola and Samsung increase prepaid phone market shares | Image by PhoneArena
During the second quarter of 2026, Counterpoint said that US Smartphone sales declined 5% year-over-year. The global market research firm said that several factors impacted the purchases of connected handsets in the country. One problem was the drop in disposable income thanks to higher gas prices, which was the result of the situation in the Middle East.
Smartphone sales in the US impacted by high demand for memory chips
The second issue was the higher prices of several smartphone components, like DRAM memory chips, due to abnormally high demand for AI accelerators like Nvidia's AI chips. Because the High-Bandwidth Memory chips (HBM) used to prevent data processing bottlenecks during model training and inference; the former is the education phase when the model is figuring out patterns. The latter is teaching the AI model how to answer queries using its learned knowledge.
Here's the thing folks. Getting a standard database to remember a 500-page book is a simple matter of uploading the text. AI works much differently as the model goes through the material trillions of times, guessing what word comes next, failing, making mathematical changes until it understands the underlying patterns.
Every HBM produced by a foundry uses three times the silicon wafer capacity used for a standard DDR5 DRAM chip. Memory producers such as SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron only have finite amount of manufacturing capacity and prefer to use it to build HBMs with higher profit margins. The bottom line is that there is a shortage of DRAM chips for smartphones.
Big 4 US smartphone sales show Q2 decline
Smartphone sales of the big 4 (Apple, Samsung, Motorola, and Google) in the US during Q2 2026 declined 4% on an annual basis. However, with DRAM prices skyrocketing, the lower end of the US smartphone market has been affected the most as profit margins on low-end phones are thinner than Ariana Grande.
Which prepaid provider (MVNO) would you switch to?
Sales of phones that cost under $100 in the US dropped by a whopping 64% year-over-year during Q2 of 2026. Manufacturers either stopped shipping phones in this tier, or had to raise prices after paying more for memory chips.
Motorola and Samsung increase their prepaid market share in the US during Q2
Sales of phones sold through US prepaid wireless providers declined 11% from the second quarter of 2025 to the same quarter this year. Despite the overall weakness in this area, Samsung and Motorola actually picked up market share in this fragile sector of the market. That is because prepaid firms are offering the low-to-mid-range Samsung Galaxy A series and Moto G series models to attract consumers switching wireless providers.
Motorola saw its Q2 prepaid market share rise four percentage points year-over-year from 28% to 32%. However, Samsung's sales in the sector increased 9 percentage points from 38% to 47% during the same time allowing Samsung to increase its lead over Motorola from 10 percentage points to 15. The "others" group, which was responsible for 34% of prepaid phone sales during Q2 of 2025, saw its share of prepaid phone sales decline to 20% for this year's second quarter.
Apple's iPhone 18 Pro pricing to push US Average Selling Price (ASP) higher during Q3
Counterpoint's latest report also noted that the average selling price (ASP) for smartphones will continue to rise in the U.S. during the third quarter as Apple is expected to raise the pricing for the iPhone 18 Pro series. The tech giant usually accounts for 50% of smartphone sales in Q3 when its latest models are released. The foldable iPhone Ultra is also expected to become the most expensive iPhone model ever, but might not ship until the fourth quarter, which could delay an even larger ASP increase until Q4.
Also affecting Q3 pricing are the more expensive price tags that Google has put on the recently unveiled Pixel 11 handsets. Even with higher US smartphone sales could remain strong during the third quarter if carriers can keep subsidies of new iPhone models high enough to offer them to consumers for free or close to free.
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