India, Oct. 21 -- Everyone had a plan. Wait for the festive sale, grab a decent smartphone at a slashed price, outsmart the market. And then the market hit back. The deals that did show up during the festive window were barely worth the excitement: a few hundred rupees here, a bank offer there, nothing that changed the math meaningfully. The reality, as anyone tracking the smartphone industry right now would tell you, is that waiting is no longer a strategy. Global DRAM and NAND flash memory shortages, driven heavily by chipmakers pivoting production capacity toward AI data centre infrastructure, are pushing bill-of-material costs upward across the board. According to data from Counterpoint Research, global smartphone shipments dropped 20...