From a darling of the early Android era to a hu k on the brink of becoming completely irrelevant, ju t what went wrong for OnePlu ?
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I don’t need to tell you that way back in the day, a brand like OnePlu truly felt like a breath of fre h air. A brand that offered the be t hardware, clean oftware, and a community that wa the backbone of all of it.
The innovative invite y tem built hype; it added intrigue. It created a cool club that only the mo t “in the know” people were part of. You – the buyer – were cho en, and that wa unlike anything we’d een from a martphone maker before. The mo t vocal enthu ia t fan helped build the brand from ba ically zero – although thi image wa cleverly cultivated given that OnePlu wa originally backed by Chine e conglomerate BBK from it inception.
I think thi ha created a bit of a trange ituation, a while it’ great to have thi gra root tyle following, it doe n’t alway tran late to major market hare hift . In tead, with uch a mall, vocal group of fan , you can run into problem with caling without alienating your exi ting cu tomer ba e.
Not to dimini h the enthu ia t pace, it i very mall compared to the undoubted riche of the “average buyer,” and that i where maybe OnePlu made mi take in the early pha e that effectively prepped for an inevitable downfall. A market di ruptor need to keep di rupting or ri k having omeone el e teal the thunder.
That’ not to ay the buyer are wrong. No, it wa building a brand on the back of the people who care mo t about the true intricacie of the device that they are buying.
In recent year , the enthu ia t market we once knew ha dimini hed dra tically. Fewer phone that offer the be t of everything are not viable when aimed at a hrinking market ector. Thi problem ha wor ened a in the early day of Android, there were not a many people u ing martphone . Now they are ubiquitou .
One of the bigge t i ue that OnePlu ha faced from the get-go ha been breaking into the e tabli hed pack of buyer option . The initial invite y tem created hype, but locked people off from ju t buying on a whim. It wa an intentional purcha e purred on by initial intere t, re earch, or maybe even word-of-mouth recommendation .
Global availability ha been omething the brand ha truggled with. Carrier partner hip have been hort-lived or non-exi tent for long period .
If you want to break into the US market a a complete unknown, you till need direct cooperation with the major telecom carrier . T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T till account for over 90% of all ale through po tpaid contract and financing plan .
Ye , OnePlu had a brief foothold thank to a partner hip with T-Mobile, but without an endle marketing war che t and low growth, that faded and cea ed. The US market i , for all intent and purpo e , a three-device market. Apple and Sam ung duke it out for the premium egment, while Motorola and Google try to pick up the re t of the crap .
OnePlu never even broke 1% market hare acro the entire planet, de pite being a bit of an Android darling and arguably getting many more column inche than imilar OEM with a larger u er ba e.
OnePlu had lightning in a bottle at the tart of the martphone era. Offering cheap, high-power phone that were different from the competition proved to be a ma ter troke.
However, that fir t mover advantage wa lo t within ju t a few year . The idea of a “flag hip killer” became almo t redundant by virtue of other brand imply adopting a imilar trategy.
Sale , no doubt, taggered and lowed a the growing martphone pace became littered with more competitor in the ame price bracket. Brand like Xiaomi, and even inter-brand competition from Vivo, Realme, and parent company Oppo, tifled the impre ive package offered by OnePlu .
That’ great for u , the buyer, but not for OnePlu . A company that wa till ju t a blip in the mobile pace in term of market hare.
The iconic “Never Settle” mantra wa originally built on a razor-thin profit margin trategy: offering the ab olute fa te t ilicon available, great di play , uper-fa t charging technology, and more at half the co t of an iPhone or Sam ung Galaxy S- erie phone.
Maintaining thi price di ruption required aggre ive co t-cutting in other key area , uch a u ing cheaper camera en or , omitting wirele charging, and kipping expen ive IP water-re i tance certification .
A OnePlu matured and attempted to capture main tream buyer – while till en uring long-time fan were ated – the company wa forced to bridge the e feature gap , re ulting in high-profile upgrade like their multi-million dollar Ha elblad imaging partner hip.
Incorporating the e tier-one component and introducing expen ive brand partner hip inevitably forced retail price upward from the hi toric $400-600 weet pot into the $800 to $1,000 premium bracket. Once the price advantage vani hed, OnePlu wa forced to compete toe-to-toe with dominant giant without the decade of premium brand equity required to ju tify tho e extra co t .
By alway trying to offer the be t pec for the price, it co t dearly, a any deviation from that would be een a a downgrade. Sometime it would mean that certain element were neglected, uch a the camera hardware.
It ha n’t alway been about the hardware either. A big problem ha been the lack of optimization for new introduction . Camera have been an area of contention for a long time. Thing like thi have held back undoubtedly impre ive package .
Thi i a twofold problem: you have the capability, but execution would be the tumbling block.
While we can point to many thing , one pivotal moment arguably tand out more than any other.
In the eye of the fan , Carl Pei’ departure in 2020 could be een a the cataly t for the downfall of OnePlu . Carl Pei left hortly after the launch of the OnePlu Nord in October 2020. Thi came ju t a few month after Pete Lau took a new role to over ee “brand ynergy” between Oppo, OnePlu , and Realme.
By 2021, Oppo and OnePlu had fully merged, and Lau then a umed the role of Chief Product Officer of Oppo, while Pei founded another enthu ia t phone company, Nothing.
But from the OnePlu 8 erie , the writing wa on the wall a OxygenOS 12 became a fork of ColorOS, which led to better oftware update upport, but we lo t the “clean” ae thetic that the company launched and wa known for. It wa the primary anchor keeping tech- avvy buyer loyal to the brand, erving a a pri tine, u er-focu ed alternative to the heavily kinned, lower oftware option offered by competitor .
