The Twisted Price Increase Game: A Survival Battle for the Home Appliance Industry under the PPI and CPI Scissors Gap

If you’ve recently walked into an appliance store or browsed air conditioner and refrigerator pages on e-commerce platforms, you might feel a sense of confusion: The news keeps talking about surging raw material costs, copper prices hitting historic highs, and manufacturers issuing price increase letters. But at the consumer end, prices remain unable to stay firm. Why is it that for the same air conditioner, some models have quietly gone up by 300 yuan, while others are still participating in “Billion Subsidy” campaigns? Why do manufacturers complain about the “cost red line,” yet are reluctant to raise price tags visibly?

This kind of “contradiction” is precisely the most authentic portrait of China’s home appliance industry in 2026.

The broader background is also clear. In March 2026, China’s PPI turned positive for the first time after 41 consecutive months of decline, rising 0.5% year-on-year, with the month-on-month increase hitting a four-year high. Meanwhile, CPI rose by only 1.0% year-on-year, and even fell month-on-month. The core meaning behind this data set is not complicated: Upstream prices are rising, but downstream prices can’t keep up. The renewed convergence of the so-called “PPI-CPI scissors difference” essentially means that profits are being squeezed from the mid and downstream back to upstream. And the home appliance sector happens to be one of the sharpest points of this “scissors.”

01 Raw materials for major white goods see widespread price increases, the home appliance industry faces a major cost test in the first half of 2026

Since the second half of 2025, copper prices have accumulated nearly a 30% increase, and even hit a historic high at the start of 2026. For the white goods sector, this is not a simple cost fluctuation, but a direct shock to its business model. Air conditioners, refrigerators, and washing machines—typical durable consumer goods—have core structures highly dependent on copper, aluminum, steel, and plastics, with copper alone accounting for up to 20%-30% of air conditioner costs.

This means that every upward move in copper prices and other raw materials transfers almost “linearly” to the company’s bill of materials (BOM). If we add in the pulse-like surge in plastic prices driven by oil prices in Q1 2026, and the rebound in steel prices due to equipment renewal demand, white goods companies are not facing just a single variable shock, but a “multi-point resonance” cost increase.

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