Russians are increasingly buying smartphones with smaller storage capacities, according to Konstantin Podstreshny, director of the media agency Navigator, who spoke to Russia's National News Service (NSN).
Podstreshny linked the shift in consumer demand to conditions in the consumer electronics market. He said chipmakers are redirecting production capacity toward the corporate sector amid rising demand from the artificial intelligence industry, and that this is affecting the availability of components for consumer devices.
Storage as a place to save
Storage capacity is one of the specifications buyers can cut back on when choosing a device, Podstreshny said. A child does not care whether a phone has 128 gigabytes or 256 gigabytes of storage, he said, since a child will fill up whatever space is available, and no amount is ever enough.
Podstreshny said another driver of demand for lower-capacity phones is that people are buying a second handset for apps, including banking apps, that are not available through the digital stores run by Apple and Google.
Many Russian banks have faced restrictions from Apple and Google since 2022, when the companies removed a number of Russian banking apps from their app stores amid Western sanctions tied to the war in Ukraine. Users in Russia have since found workarounds, including installing such apps on separate devices.
For many buyers, Podstreshny said, a stable internet connection and a device's overall performance now matter more than the maximum amount of built-in storage.
AI demand strains chip supply
The rapid growth of artificial intelligence has driven a global surge in demand for processors and high-bandwidth memory chips used to train and run AI models. That demand has strained semiconductor supply chains in recent years, prompting manufacturers to prioritize orders from data centres and corporate clients over consumer electronics makers.
Freeing up storage on Android
Experts have previously said that functions built into Google's Android operating system take up a significant amount of a device's storage. Removing them, the experts said, can free up disk space and help optimize a phone's digital storage.
