Turning all the minuses into pluses
While global smartphone shipments continue with a year-long downward spiral, a burgeoning Chinese mainland brand is, seemingly, turning the tide.
Shenzhen-based smartphone maker OnePlus, which has been around for five years, is giving its peers a run for their money, sinking its teeth into major domains around the world.
According to market researcher Strategy Analytics, the world’s smartphone shipments tumbled 8 percent in the third quarter of this year — the fourth consecutive quarter of decline — from a year ago.
While global smartphone behemoths like Apple and South Korea’s Samsung have not been immune to the rout, OnePlus has emerged as the best-selling, high-end smartphone vendor in India while making its footprint in the mainstream US market.
Pete Lau, founder and chief executive of OnePlus, says the secret of his success is paying tremendous attention to product details.
“I like weighing the product details with our designers each day, making ourselves the best we can,” he tells China Daily.
The company’s latest product features an in-display fingerprint sensor and the unlocking time its supplier provides is about the industry’s general 0.4 to 0.6 seconds. But, Lau pushed his team to lift that to just 0.34 seconds.
Another of his obsession is to get each command done, using only the thumb. He likes to slide up and down on his phone in various angles whenever he has time, trying to figure out how to make it more flexible and convenient.
He goes for perfection even where users can’t see. For example, he devoted particular interest to the number of layers on the phone’s exterior to achieve a better feeling. “Users may not notice it visually, but they can tell the difference once they hold the phone in their hands,” says Lau.
The phone’s operating system OxygenOS is filled with considerable features, such as when a user is playing games on a OnePlus model, he or she won’t be disturbed by incoming calls.
Lau’s obsession with smartphones grew when he started off his career working for another prominent Chinese smartphone brand Oppo. As head of its blue-ray DVD player department at the time, Lau once was so mad about the chaos from wiring on the mainboard inside a testing player that he smashed it.
After leaving Oppo, the entrepreneur set up OnePlus in 2013 and, in the short space of a year, the company’s smartphone shipments had exceeded 1.5 million units.
Lau adopted a global market strategy from the very beginning, and saw up to 70 percent of the company’s $1.4-billion revenues last year coming from overseas markets.
Unlike most Chinese technology companies, which usually focus on mass-market products, OnePlus sells only two types of premium phones each year, both for more than $400.
In October this year, Lau led OnePlus into the mainstream US market in cooperation with the third-largest US mobile operator T-mobile after topping the premium smartphones market in India.
The partnership is seen as a milestone because most US consumers purchase phones through their carriers. Before the team-up, T-mobile sells only Apple and Samsung phones.
Jia Mo of technology market analyst firm Canalys believes it’s a smart strategy for an upcoming company to focus on one or two internationalized products to save costs.
But, he warned that it’s risky for OnePlus to take on the US market, considering the hammering Chinese phone makers Huawei and ZTE had encountered recently.
He’s also worried that OnePlus is facing stiff competition from Xiaomi’s new premium brand pocophone, which is rapidly penetrating the European and Asia-Pacific markets.
However, Lau shrugged off these concerns, believing that the biggest challenge for Chinese startups in going global is to earn the respect of overseas partners and users.
During negotiations with T-mobile, Lau reveals, he was asked to pre-install an application by a technology giant, who has an agreement with the carrier, but he refused in order to keep a consistent style — a brief system for users. The result was that both the carrier and the other company compromised and told him: “We respect your spirit of never-settling.”
The clear-headed entrepreneur says there’re too many so-called high-techs nowadays, but he believes 5G is truly revolutionary, so he invested in the technology and has decided to be the first brand to launch 5G smartphones next year in Europe.
But, Lau says users won’t be getting 5G’s revolutionary experience in at least five years when the technology expands from phones to the internet of things.
Users may not notice it visually, but they can tell the difference once they hold the phone in their hands.” Pete Lau,