Prabhu RamFor over a year now, OnePlus and OPPO have been focused on bringing more synergies to their operations, and script their future. For OnePlus, this new chapter is a pivotal one. The company that Pete Lau and Carl Pei started together as a flagship challenger brand, has attained scale over the years. Last year, Pete Lau became OPPO’s Chief Product Officer, while Carl exited the ship.
In an interesting community blog post, Pete Lau, CEO at OnePlus officially announced that OnePlus will integrate further with OPPO going forward.
“Over the past eight years, the OnePlus brand has grown from an exciting newcomer into a global force to be reckoned with. In the premium category, we have been widely recognized in the industry for the quality of our products and the ability to outperform other brands with significantly larger budgets. And among tech enthusiasts like many of you, we have built a large and highly engaged community with a focus on openness and co-creation.
Now, we’re at a turning point for the future of OnePlus. As we’ve begun growing our product portfolio, we’re able to give you more choices than ever before. True to our Never Settle spirit, we want to continue giving you the highest-quality OnePlus experience possible. And to do that, we must adapt as a team and as a brand.
As many of you know, last year I took on some additional responsibilities to oversee product strategy for both OnePlus and OPPO. Since then, we have integrated a number of our teams together with OPPO to better streamline our operations and capitalize on additional shared resources. After seeing positive impact from those changes, we’ve decided to further integrate our organization with OPPO.”
In an increasingly hyper-competitive smartphone market, it makes prudent sense for OnePlus and OPPO to share resources and build together. While doing so, they will still be able to craft differentiated product offerings for their consumer cohorts.
For OnePlus, the integration with OPPO accords it with economies of scale, R&D prowess, and supply chain efficiencies to potentially foray further as an increasingly mainstream brand. Of late, OnePlus has moved from its earlier challenger brand positioning to a mainstream brand. For instance, OnePlus has been focused on debuting horizontally differentiated product offerings across price-segments. Going forward, it will be able to build better and ship better across premium and value for money smartphone segments.
More importantly, the OnePlus and OPPO combined horizontal integration will now span across price segments, and market channels – online and offline, potentially mirroring a reach akin to Samsung.
Here is what Pete Lau mentions:
“I’m confident that this change will be positive for our community and our users. With this deeper integration with OPPO, we will have more resources at hand to create even better products for you. It will also allow us to be more efficient, for example, bringing faster and more stable software updates for OnePlus users.
As for the OnePlus brand – we will continue to operate independently, focused on providing you with the best possible products and experience as we have always done. We will continue launching OnePlus products, holding events (hopefully in person soon) and engaging directly with you for feedback through the same OnePlus channels as before. OnePlus’ commitment to you remains the same.
As always, we wanted to let you – our community – know about this directly from us as soon as we could share the news with you. You are a vital part of the OnePlus family, so it’s important that we communicate changes like this with you directly. Thank you for supporting us over all these years. We can’t do any of this without the OnePlus community.”
As the world pivots to an era of smart and connected living, OnePlus and OPPO will be able to leverage their unique strengths, and build for market success, going far beyond smartphones.
