Samsung’s first tri-fold phone landed with the sort of fanfare reserved for small miracles and headline-grabbing price tags: a single configuration, 16GB RAM and 512GB storage, priced at 3,594,000 won in South Korea — roughly $2,400–$2,500 once you do the conversion. Samsung framed the TriFold as a showcase of what foldable engineering can do, and it’s built like it: multiple hinges, a layered ultra-thin display stack and parts you don’t see on everyday phones.

But a piece in Korea’s The Bell has a less glamorous read on the math: the TriFold apparently costs more to make than Samsung is charging for it, meaning the company is effectively losing money on every unit sold. That’s not a subtle margin squeeze — it’s a strategic decision, according to the reporting and quotes from Samsung’s own executives who described the phone as a “special edition” targeted at people who want to try the form factor rather than a mainstream volume play.

How did a phone that costs the equivalent of a small used car end up being sold at a loss? One big driver is memory. DRAM and high-end LPDDR5X modules suddenly matter in a new way: AI data-center demand has sucked up capacity and pushed memory prices higher across the board. The same market forces that send server makers scrambling for HBM and DRAM roll down the supply chain and inflate the bill of materials for premium phones that pack lots of RAM and fast storage. Suppliers and buyers have both been forced to reprice product roadmaps in 2025 as a result.

That memory pinch is only part of it. A tri-fold device is intrinsically complex: two hinge assemblies, multiple flexible panels, segmented batteries and bespoke chassis work. Each of those pieces is costlier than the parts in a conventional slab phone, and the earliest production runs lack the efficiency that comes from volume manufacturing. Put it together and you get a device that’s expensive to source and expensive to assemble — even if the sticker makes you wince.

Selling hardware at a loss is a gambit we’ve seen before in consumer tech. Game consoles are the classic example: console makers have famously absorbed hardware losses early in the product cycle while they build a platform for recurring revenue from software and services. The idea is the same here — Samsung may be prioritizing being first (or best-looking) in a new category, getting units in reviewers’ hands, and owning the narrative around foldable innovation, instead of hammering a margin out of every early sale.

The commercial consequences are already visible. Samsung has limited the TriFold’s launch to select markets and relatively small production runs, which keeps the device rare and prevents the company from scaling up a loss across tens of millions of units. In practice, that means buyers outside the initial launch countries will wait: the TriFold debuted in Korea in mid-December and Samsung has said other markets — including the U.S. — will follow in the early months of 2026. That staged rollout buys Samsung time to watch component prices, tighten manufacturing, and decide whether the next iteration should be cheaper, smaller, or both.

For buyers, that’s both good news and bad news. If you’re a gadget obsessive, scarcity and a headline price don’t matter — you get a unique device that pushes the envelope. If you want value or long-term durability, the TriFold’s early-generation parts, steep repair costs and lack of broad support make it a more fraught purchase. Samsung itself seems to acknowledge that this one is about signaling rather than making money off volume sales.

What happens next is the real question. If memory prices ease and suppliers scale up, Samsung can either nudge prices down, improve margins, or keep pricing steady and pocket more profit later. If they don’t, the TriFold may stay a scarce halo product rather than the start of a mass category. Either way, the first TriFold tells you where Samsung wants to be: visible at the frontier of foldable design, even if that frontier costs the company money in the near term.