Where is OnePlus going?
This is a question that has been hovering over OnePlus’ head since its merger with OPPO in June last year.
In an interview earlier this year, OnePlus President Li Jie was also asked this question. He said frankly, “I haven’t fully figured it out yet.”
In the current environment of increasingly fierce competition in the mobile phone industry, it is undoubtedly the right decision for OnePlus to merge into OPPO. But it is easy to judge right and wrong, but it is much more complicated and difficult to do and do the right thing well.
A year and a half after the merger, OPPO and OnePlus have found the best way to synergize with each other.
OnePlus’ Identity Dilemma
Since 2017, the market of China’s smartphone market has been declining. The shrinking market size has led to extremely fierce competition in the mobile phone industry, and the living space of small and medium mobile phone brands has been further squeezed by top manufacturers.
According to the 2021 China mobile phone market share data and ranking released by Counterpoint Research , leading manufacturers such as vivo, OPPO, Apple, Xiaomi, and Honor have a market share as high as 96%, which means that only 4% of the market share is left for other brands .
Since the release of the first product OnePlus 1 in 2014, in the past eight years, although OnePlus mobile phones have accumulated a good reputation among users through generations of products, the sales volume is still a niche brand. In the first half of 2021, global shipments increased by 257% year-on-year, and annual sales exceeded 10 million units for the first time.
This result cannot be said to be bad, but the smartphone market is a shura field where if you do not advance, you will retreat, and there is no room for “small and beautiful” survival.
In the face of fierce market competition, OnePlus must adopt a more aggressive attitude to further expand and strengthen.
At this time, merging with OPPO has become the best choice. After the integration, OnePlus can get help from OPPO in terms of supply chain, technology, channels and after-sales.
“First of all, it is reflected in the supply chain. The current mobile phone industry is very concentrated. OPPO’s global shipments in 2021 will be about 200 million, which enables us to obtain sufficient support from the supply chain, technology, and supply guarantee in case of shortage. Big advantages. Secondly, OPPO’s research institute and Mariana’s technology are resources that OnePlus can use. Third, in terms of channels, OPPO’s channels will also empower and support OnePlus. Fourth, OPPO’s After-sales outlets have covered most of the country, and this after-sales system has been gradually opened to OnePlus.” Li Jie said in an interview with the media.
However, business merger is also a systematic project, which affects the whole body. After being merged into OPPO, how OnePlus repositions its role has become a topic that tests the group’s high-level strategic vision.
For a long time, OnePlus has two very distinct labels-geek and high-end.
Since the debut of the first product, OnePlus mobile phone has been deeply concerned and loved by overseas geek user groups. According to official disclosures, employees of Amazon, Facebook and Google bought the most OnePlus phones in the early days. At that time, many CEOs of Silicon Valley companies said that they had heard of or used OnePlus mobile phones, such as Steve Wozniak, the former founder of Apple, Pete Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal, and Walt Mossberg, a reporter whom Jobs admired very much.
With the endorsement of these Silicon Valley elites, OnePlus quickly opened up the high-end market in many overseas countries, and even surpassed Apple and Samsung many times to become the number one in the high-end market in India.
In July this year, Kantar and Google released the “2022 Brandz China Top 50 Global Brands List”, in which OnePlus mobile phone has been on the list for 6 consecutive years, and has been in the top ten list for 4 consecutive years.
However, after being merged into OPPO, the positioning of OnePlus must be changed.
On the one hand, if OnePlus wants to continue to grow, it must find new groups and scenarios on the basis of serving the original geek group. In this process, how to maintain its own brand tonality and characteristics is a big challenge.
On the other hand, in the high-end market, how OnePlus and OPPO’s Find series can achieve efficient synergy through clear differentiated positioning and achieve the effect of 1+1>2 is also a test of the group’s ability to deploy troops.
Today, this question has a clear answer.
OPPO returns to battle and opens the era of dual brands
On December 17, OnePlus held its ninth anniversary celebration. At the event, Liu Zuohu, chief product officer of OPPO and founder of OnePlus, gave a systematic introduction to the next strategic collaboration between OPPO and OnePlus: In the future, OPPO will continue to use the Find and Reno hero series to focus on imaging and design. Leading the industry, OnePlus, as the pioneer brand of OPPO’s main performance, focuses on the performance track.
This is how OPPO started the era of dual brands. In the future, OPPO will be OnePlus online.
This is undoubtedly a very clever design.
On the one hand, this not only continues the inherent “geek” tone of OnePlus, but also effectively separates it from OPPO’s existing product line.
It should be emphasized that the repositioned OnePlus is not targeting geeks in a narrow sense, but young technology enthusiasts in a broader sense.
Li Jie once described the difference between OPPO and OnePlus user groups in this way: Taking the Find series as an example, OPPO is internally defined as a group of “newly educated young people”. The popular understanding is probably office white-collar workers who value photography and business functions; while OnePlus users are very Most of them pursue performance and are partial to technology enthusiasts.
Most of these people are young men, a large part of them are students, and they are usually heavy users of mobile games.
Starting from this, OnePlus hopes that the main target group in the future will be “young people who love to play games and pursue performance”. expertise.
But this does not mean that OnePlus will be a gaming phone. Li Jie emphasized that in the future, OnePlus should be comprehensive and smooth, including long-term use and smooth application activation. “Games will be our important scenes, but not all of us.”
After the re-planning, each series of OnePlus and OPPO has a clear positioning. In terms of product definition, it is not necessary to pursue a large and comprehensive product definition. Instead, it can have its own characteristics and complement each other to more accurately meet the needs of specific groups of people.
On the other hand, the positioning of OnePlus’ main line is also intended to seek growth.
In the era when feature phones turned to smart phones, OPPO continued to attack by virtue of its offline channels and other advantages, and finally stood at the pinnacle of the Chinese smartphone market around 2016.
Today, brands such as Xiaomi and Honor, which have an advantage online, have also begun to make a large-scale deployment offline, intending to erode the market share of OPPO, which has an absolute advantage offline. While OPPO is trying to defend its base camp, it is bound to need to counterattack the online market to seek growth.
Judging from the data, although the market of China’s smartphone market has been declining since 2017, the scale of the online market has been rising steadily: In 2020, the online market will account for about 29% of the overall market, and it is expected to grow in 2023. It will rise to 33%, which is a rare bright spot in the cold winter of the mobile phone industry.
OnePlus is undoubtedly the best choice to undertake the important task of “counterattack line”.
On the one hand, OnePlus was born as an online brand. It has cooperated with many domestic and foreign e-commerce giants such as Amazon and expanded multiple international markets including Europe and the United States. It has rich experience in the online market; on the other hand, OnePlus focuses on The performance track, the ultimate pursuit of products, is also more in line with the style of Internet brands. It can be used as a single-point breakthrough with a sharp knife to achieve overtaking on curves and change the online market structure.
Liu Zuohu, chief product officer of OPPO and founder of OnePlus, emphasized, “OPPO Online is OnePlus. It doesn’t mean that OPPO has no online channels, but that OPPO is omni-channel, and OnePlus focuses on online.” In the future, online, OPPO will have many Resources—including funds, traffic, technology, etc., will be prioritized towards OnePlus.
Start again, how far can OnePlus go?
For OnePlus, merging into OPPO is bound to benefit. But in the past, these benefits were more generalized than quantified.
Now that the brand positioning has been re-defined, in order to better support the development of OnePlus, at the 9th anniversary celebration, Liu Zuohu also announced several figures on behalf of OPPO:
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10 billion
Liu Zuohu said that OPPO will invest 10 billion yuan in OnePlus in the next three years, and this is only the cost of OPPO’s investment in the OnePlus brand alone, not including basic research and development, supply chain, channels, etc., which are shared by OnePlus and OPPO. resources and funding.
Liu Zuohu revealed that the 10 billion will be mainly used for the research and development of new technologies.
OnePlus is positioned as a pioneer brand focusing on performance. Improving the performance of mobile phones depends more on the development of components in the early stage, such as the progress of chip manufacturing technology and other technologies. Nowadays, mobile phone performance optimization has entered the deep water area. In addition to customizing components, mobile phone manufacturers have to do a lot of optimization on the underlying technology.
In the future, OnePlus will not only be able to share the accumulation of OPPO’s deep technology, but will also conduct a large number of underlying technology research and development around its own product positioning, such as chip scheduling, memory management, heat dissipation, and so on.
Li Jie revealed that on the upcoming OnePlus 11, OnePlus will launch a revolutionary technology for memory. At present, this technology has been officially recognized by Google.
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10000+
To do a good job in technology research and development, in addition to money, the key is to have talents.
At present, major mobile phone manufacturers are striving to compete for key technical talents. Before the merger, with OnePlus’ business volume, it was difficult to attract and support enough top technical talents.
However, after integrating with OPPO, OnePlus can get technical support from 10,000+ engineers from OPPO Research Institute and OPPO Group. Liu Zuohu revealed that the OPPO Research Institute and the entire technical team have multiple main lines in terms of technology research and development. Among them, there are special technical reserves for software and hardware in the early stage of performance and game lines. OnePlus will give priority to carrying these main lines of OPPO, including chips, networks, Leading technology in signal, overall performance, charging, heat dissipation materials and more.
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5000+
Although OnePlus is positioned as an online brand, in this era when users have higher and higher requirements for product experience, the layout of offline channels is also essential.
Li Jie once said that although OnePlus’s main battlefield is online channels, it does not mean giving up offline. Through offline experience points covering the whole country, more users can directly touch their phones. OnePlus products have advantages in experience and texture. In order to be fully released, it is also very good to satisfy some offline experience and the consumption habits of users who place orders online.
In addition, if OnePlus wants to move from the past “small and beautiful” to popularization, offline channels will inevitably be a key node. Especially this year, OnePlus launched the mid-to-high-end Ace series. Whether it can bring more new users to OnePlus depends largely on offline channels.
OPPO’s offline channel network has helped it open up the sinking market in one fell swoop. Now, with the help of OPPO’s accumulation of offline channels, OnePlus’ offline layout is also expected to be further upgraded and reshaped.
At present, OnePlus products have entered OPPO’s offline channels. This year, OnePlus’ offline experience stores will cover 2,800 districts and counties across the country, more than 4,000 business districts, and the number of experience points will exceed 5,000.
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1000
If a brand wants to become bigger and stronger, perfect after-sales service is indispensable. In this regard, OPPO, vivo and Huawei have done a very good job, while OnePlus still has a lot of homework to make up.
According to Leifeng.com, before the merger with OPPO, OnePlus had only two authorized stores in Guangzhou. This is the case in first-tier cities like Guangzhou, and the difficulty of after-sales in other low-tier cities can be imagined.
OnePlus is obviously aware of this problem, so as early as the OnePlus 10 Pro conference, it publicly stated that nearly 1,000 OPPO after-sales outlets have been opened to OnePlus users.
At the 9th anniversary celebration, Liu Zuohu reiterated this message again. He said, “In the past two years, the cycle of changing mobile phones has become longer and longer, from 18 months in the past few years to more than 30 months now, which makes users pay more attention to the experience of after-sales service.”
With the after-sales service resource support of the OPPO system, users will be able to enjoy more comprehensive and convenient after-sales services near their homes in the future. This is undoubtedly an important boost for OnePlus to win more users.
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0
In addition, in order to support OnePlus to make good products and better compete for market growth. OPPO’s company policy allows that the hardware comprehensive net profit margin of OnePlus products can be 0 in the next three years. In other words, the OnePlus team does not need to consider profitability for the time being, as long as they focus on making products well.
Li Jie said that the comprehensive net profit margin of hardware can be 0, which does not mean that OnePlus will blindly set low prices and fight price wars. This is not the original intention and original intention of OnePlus.
“At our core, we still want to start from the needs of users, make the product well, and make the real experience a good one. Therefore, we have a premise when the net profit margin can be 0, and we must first make the product well.”
For OnePlus, in the past two years, its goals have never been so clear, and it has never had such rich resources.
In Li Jie’s words, “Now is no longer the stage of direction. The resources, manpower, and future technology investment that are matched under this have all reached the stage of roadmap implementation, and they are all very clear.”
This gave him great confidence.
Li Jie said that he hopes that in the next three years, OnePlus can achieve the No. 1 share in the online market of more than 2,000 yuan.
However, in the current highly competitive mobile phone industry, it is not easy to achieve this goal.
We will wait and see whether OnePlus, which has brought countless surprises, can create new miracles in the future. Leifeng.com Leifeng.com
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