Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon confirmed on July 29, 2026 that prices on the company's products will go up starting September 1. He said so in a CNBC interview tied to the company's earnings presentation. "Prices are going to go up," Amon told the interviewer, making official what had been told to customers five days earlier.

On July 24, Qualcomm told its customers that chip prices would rise by double-digit percentages — meaning at least 10 percent or more. The news was first reported by Bloomberg and confirmed the same day by Reuters (Reuters). Amon's earnings-day comments put a public face on a decision that phone makers had already been absorbing privately.

The price hike arrives as Qualcomm's phone business is shrinking. The company reported a 20 percent year-over-year drop in handset revenue during the same earnings presentation, its lowest level since 2021. Qualcomm blamed what it called "unprecedented increases in memory pricing and supply constraints" (The Verge). Memory chips — the components that let phones store data and run apps — have gotten more expensive, raising Qualcomm's costs for building its Snapdragon processors, which are the main chips inside many Android phones. The company is now passing some of that cost on to the phone makers who buy its chips, and those phone makers are already operating on thin profit margins.

Some of those phone makers are already responding by switching to older, cheaper Qualcomm chips. Akash Palkhiwala, Qualcomm's CFO and COO, said on the earnings call that certain customers have started using prior-generation Qualcomm silicon to save money. Think of it like a car buyer choosing last year's model because the newest version costs too much — the older one still gets you where you need to go. The risk for Qualcomm is that this becomes a permanent habit rather than a short-term workaround, especially if the price increase pushes the newest chips so high that the older ones are good enough for most people.

Qualcomm is also losing business with Apple. The company expects its share of the modem chips — the components that let a phone connect to cellular networks — in the upcoming iPhone to be "materially lower." Apple has been working for years to build its own modem chips instead of buying them from Qualcomm. That phrase, "materially lower," is a concrete sign that Apple's effort is progressing. Qualcomm now treats the loss of Apple-related revenue not as a possible risk but as something it expects to happen.

Looking at the bigger picture, Qualcomm projected that only half of its revenue will come from phones in the near term, dropping to roughly one-third by 2029 as its data center and automotive businesses grow. The automotive push got a concrete boost on the same day as the earnings report: Qualcomm announced a decade-long deal to supply chips for BMW (The Verge). A ten-year supply agreement in the car industry is a big deal; car design cycles run over several years, and locking in a partner for a decade gives Qualcomm a steady revenue stream in a segment where cars are using more and more chips for features like navigation, safety systems, and entertainment.

The company is also returning money to its shareholders. Qualcomm raised its quarterly dividend — a regular cash payment to people who own its stock — from $0.89 to $0.92 per share on March 17, 2026. A $0.92 quarterly dividend has been declared, payable September 24, 2026 to stockholders of record. That dividend increase came about four months before the price hike was announced, meaning Qualcomm had already signaled financial confidence to its shareholders before the cost squeeze became a public topic.

In my view, the signals from this earnings event describe a company going through a deliberate transition rather than facing a sudden crisis. The phone business is declining and the Apple modem revenue is shrinking, but at the same time Qualcomm is raising prices, locking in ten years of automotive revenue, and planning for a future where phones are a smaller part of the business. The thing to watch is whether the price hike pushes phone makers toward older, cheaper chips faster than Qualcomm expects. If enough customers step down rather than pay the higher prices, the very move meant to protect profits could speed up the shift away from phones that Qualcomm is already planning for. The company's own forecast says that shift is coming no matter what; the question is whether the price hike makes it happen sooner than expected.

For the tech industry as a whole, Qualcomm's moves tell us something about the broader cost of making electronics. Memory chip price pressure is not unique to Qualcomm, and if the company that makes some of the most widely used phone chips in the world is raising prices by double digits, higher device prices across the Android ecosystem are likely to follow.