Behind the 40% sharp drop in notebook sales: Escalating price war and intensified competition with "wait and see" consumers.

Loto Technology's latest data shows that in January-February 2026, China's online retail sales of laptops were only 947,000 units, a sharp drop of 40.5% year-on-year; with sales of 5.99 billion yuan, a decrease of over 40% as well. Both volume and value dropped, marking an unprecedented decline at the beginning of the year in recent years. Looking back at 2025, the laptop market was still a prosperous scene. With the dual stimulus of national subsidies and the rush to switch machines due to the Windows 10 service stoppage, online sales reached 13.44 million units for the entire year, a year-on-year increase of 9%. However, this prosperity laid the groundwork for the decline in 2026. "The high base and the effect of early consumption in 2025 are the direct reasons for the decline in demand this year," said an unnamed consumer electronics industry analyst to reporters. When a large number of potential consumers completed the replacement of their machines early last year, market demand in the first half of 2026 naturally presented a vacuum. But the more important reason comes from the upstream supply chain. Since the second half of 2025, global demand for DRAM and NAND flash memory chips in AI servers has surged, with the memory requirements for a single AI server being 8-10 times that of a regular server. This has led storage giants like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron to shift their advanced capacity towards producing high-profit HBM, directly squeezing traditional storage chip supplies for consumer electronics. The result of the imbalance between supply and demand is soaring prices. The price of mainstream model DDR4 8Gb chips skyrocketed from a low point of $3.2 in 2025 to $15, with a cumulative increase of up to 369%. As a core component that accounts for 15%-20% of the bill of materials (BOM) in laptops, the soaring storage costs have forced manufacturers to pass on the pressure to consumers.