How to beat Apple at its own game
Founder of Oppo and Vivo respects Tim Cook, but isn’t afraid of him
Duan Yongping is convinced Tim Cook didn’t have a clue who he was when they first met a couple years ago. The Apple boss probably does now.
Duan is the reclusive billionaire who founded Oppo and Vivo, the twin smartphone brands that dealt the world’s largest company a stinging defeat in China last year. Once derided as cheap iPhone knock-offs, they leapfrogged the rankings and shoved Apple out of the top three in 2016 — when iPhone shipments fell in China for the first time.
They managed to do it because the American smartphone giant didn’t adapt to local competition, the entrepreneur told Bloomberg. Oppo and Vivo employed tactics Apple was reluctant to match, such as cheaper devices with high-end features, for fear of jeopardizing its winning formula elsewhere, Duan said.
“Apple couldn’t beat us in China because even they have flaws,” the 56-year-old electronics mogul said. “They’re maybe too stubborn sometimes. They made a lot of great things, like their operating system, but we surpass them in other areas.”
That’s not to say Duan doesn’t appreciate the iPhone maker’s global clout. In fact, the billionaire’s obsession with his U.S. rival is well known: he’s long been a big-time investor in Apple and an unabashed fan of its chief executive officer.
“I’ve met Tim Cook on several occasions. He might not know me but we’ve chatted a little,” Duan said. “I like him a lot.”
In a 2015 blog post, he argued Apple’s profit should reach $100 billion within five years. Today, Duan won’t say when he actually bought in but says much of his overseas wealth remains tied up in the iPhone maker. He even lives in Palo Alto, an easy drive from Apple’s new UFO-like headquarters in Cupertino.
“Apple is an extraordinary company. It is a model for us to learn from,” Duan said. “We don’t have the concept of surpassing anyone, the focus instead is to improve ourselves.”
Oppo’s gains against Apple may now earn an even broader following for the billionaire dubbed China’s Warren Buffett by local media for his investment acumen. Born in Jiangxi, a birthplace of Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution, Duan began his career at a state-run vacuum tube plant before making his name with homegrown electronics.
Duan left the factory floor around 1990, when China was just embracing capitalism and opening industries to private investment. He headed to southern China’s Guangdong province, then the cradle of liberal reforms, to run a struggling electronics plant.
His first product was the “Subor” gaming console with dual-cartridge slots — a direct shot at Nintendo’s classic Family Computer, known elsewhere as the Nintendo Entertainment System. It became a hit in the absence of local competitors.
Duan left to set up a new business that year as the operation flourished — a pattern he would repeat in later years. He christened his second venture Bubugao, literally “rising higher stepby-step.” BBK, as the company came to be known, created a popular line of VCD and MP3 players but later also made DVD players for global brands. Subsidiary Bubugao Communication Equipment became one of the country’s biggest feature-phone makers around 2000, going head-to-head with Nokia and Motorola.
It was the first iPhone in 2007 that paved the way for Oppo and Vivo. While they share a common founder in Duan, the sister brands are fierce competitors, trotting out dueling marketing campaigns in markets from India to Southeast Asia. Their salesmanship philosophy plays well in emerging markets, IDC research manager Kiranjeet Kaur said.
“The companies fully understand how to make the best of their people, a specialty they inherited from Duan,” said Nicole Peng, a senior director at Canalys. Importantly, they understood their millennial audience.
Duan’s latest endeavours were, in part, dreamed up in Apple’s backyard. By 2001 at the age of 40, Duan had decided to move to California to focus on investment and philanthropy, later installing his family in a mansion he reportedly bought from Cisco Systems chair John Chambers. But the advent of the smartphone forced the entrepreneur out of retirement.
By the second half of 2000s, BBK was on the verge of falling apart as sales of its basic devices slowed. The likes of Huawei and Coolpad were making smartphones priced at around 1,000 yuan. That nearly put the company under, Duan recalled.
“We were in serious discussions about how to close the company peacefully — in a way that the employees can leave unhurt and suppliers don’t lose money,” he said.
Those intense brainstorming sessions spawned the two businesses that would go on to embody Duan’s greatest success. In 2005, the entrepreneur and his protege Tony Chen decided to create a new company. Dubbed Oppo, it sold music players but ramped up to smartphones in 2011. In 2009, BBK itself created Vivo, headed by another of Duan’s disciples, Shen Wei.
At first, neither label garnered much attention. The iPhone was captivating users with its revolutionary apps system and elegant interface, while BlackBerrys lorded over the corporate market. But Oppo and Vivo then developed a marketing-blitz approach that relied on local celebrity endorsement and a vast resellers’ store network across China. They crafted an affordable image that appealed to a millennial crowd, then tricked out their devices with high-end specs.
It paid off. The duo together shipped more than 147 million smartphones in China in 2016, dwarfing Huawei Technologies’ 76.6 million units, Apple’s 44.9 million and Xiaomi’s 41.5 million, IDC estimates. Oppo and Vivo both doubled their 2015 haul. In the fourth quarter, they were No. 1 and No. 3 — Huawei was second.