Foldable phones: Will 2026 be the turning point for the mobile phone industry?

Foldable phones aren’t a new invention. Google, Samsung and Honor have all had handsets on the market for several years and in 2024, foldables were estimated to have an 11% share in the high-end Android market.

But with Apple set to join the gang next year, 2026 is poised to be a turning point in the mobile phone industry. 

Right now, foldables sit firmly in the premium sector of the market. Though premium is defined as handsets costing over €800, the vast majority of the best foldables will set you back at least €1,300.

In 2024, foldables accounted for around 2% of Europe’s total smartphone sales and sales increased 37% year-on-year, according to research by Counterpoint.

The most common form of foldable phone — think Samsung Galaxy Fold or Honor Magic V5 — is known as the book-type foldable. Sales of those increased 60% year-on-year in 2024, though still only made up 1% of the total handset market in Europe. 

2026 will be the year for foldable phones

Apple is expected to release its long-developed foray into the world of foldable handsets in 2026, though exact details of the handset and its release are yet to be revealed. 

“We think that will boost the market for the adoption of foldable devices,” Adam Cao, president for Western Europe at Honor, told Euronews.

“Next year it's going to be the most aspirational form factor,” Daniel Hernandez Ortega, global VP of devices and consumer IoT at Telephonica, added.

And while many brands would fear battling against a tech industry heavyweight, Honor doesn’t seem to be worried about an unfair fight. 

“We are not afraid of the competition from the big brands, quite honestly. We just want to have more players in this garden to make more consumers adopt our foldable devices,” Cao explained. 

“If that big brand will boost the market and make this foldable devices market explode, we think it's perfect, we will benefit from this kind of competition. And if the consumers make some kind of comparison between some brands and us, I don't think we are going to lose the competition.”

Projected growth in a flat market

“The European market is going to be flat-ish in the next few years. So there will be countries that are going to have small single-digit growth, but overall it's a saturated market,” Hernandez Ortega told Euronews.

“In terms of Western Europe, there is not a single country that projects a double-digit growth at all in the next five years.”

According to data from GSMA, in 2024, there were 795 million SIM connections in Europe, equalling a penetration rate of 134%. While some of those SIMs could be tablets, that’s a good basic indicator that there’s already a lot of handsets in Europe. 

The industry faces another challenge to its growth, caused by a societal change towards environmental awareness and reduced consumption. 

“Customers are a little bit more intentional in the way they purchase their devices, their renewal cycles are taking longer — three to four years now, depending on the country,” Hernandez Ortega explained. 

Despite an already saturated market and more environmentally conscious consumers, there is still room for growth in the industry. 

Premium handsets now make up around a third of the market, with numbers set to continue to rise. Foldables will be a key driver and are projected to take up 10% of the premium market by 2028, with markets like the UK and Germany showing potential for greater penetration.

Counterpoint data expects book-type foldable smartphone sales to reach almost 4 million a year in Europe by 2028.

With that premium growth in mind, both the second-hand market and trade-in buying options are going to become increasingly popular to help combat the rising prices. 

“If a product is costing more than a thousand euros but you can bring your old product and it's 30-40% discount, why wouldn't you do it?,” Hernandez Ortega added. 

Even so, he emphasised the difficulty of making forecasts too far ahead of time.

“This is a little bit of a crystal-ball exercise because then you have Trump imposing tariffs and then customers in Europe losing confidence and then rationalising their wallet spend and therefore negatively impacting renewal cycles, for example. Or negatively affecting bad debt, and therefore having a negative spiral in terms of financing, for instance,” Hernandez Ortega concluded.