Rise of OnePlus in India: EXPONENTIAL

One Plus is India's best-selling premium smartphone brand with a staggering 34% share. It shipped 2 million phones in 2019 alone. Those numbers have soared since then to over 2.5 million units. They have done remarkably well in the 30K plus (400$) category. One Plus started out as this small enthusiast brand that offered all premium segment features for a budget price tag. It was hugely popular and quickly garnered a huge fan following from around the world and dominated the Asian markets.

One Plus provided what the world's middle class wanted the most: an iPhone-like feel. Everyone loves a steal deal and One Plus was just that. It did not feel like a crazy Chinese rip-off that tried to animate everything that the iPhone had but instead took on its own identity and applied its skin everywhere. You've got to remember that at the time, Samsung's software and UI were cluttery and unpleasant to look at and use. Other Chinese brands that we know today simply didn't exist then. The software has always been of their strongest points. Even today, Oxygen OS is loved and it's the 2nd best UI in my opinion. Second only to Samsung's One UI.

There are a lot of cheap phones in the market but the reason why One Plus excels is that it was first on the market and saw the immense opportunity of selling phones to a billion people when Jio entered the telecom in 2016 with prices unheard-of and obliterated the competition. So much so that India, the world's largest smartphone market, has the cheapest cellular services in the whole world. At least we can thank the billionaire for achieving this. One Plus tried to form this small-knit community of people with the introduction of the Red cable club. This is the same type of strategy that Starbucks employs. It essentially empowers customers to take to social media and talk about the brand. It's marketing that does not require them to spend even a dime.

One Plus also released just enough phones every year that people would take notice without getting riddled and failing to keep track of the new models. This has been changing in the last 2 years and a lot of people are arguing that there are rarely able to keep track of them now given One Plus’s ambitions to beat the market’s growth pace since it’s currently in a short-term growth mindset. One Plus also tries to make the headlines by collaborating with companies such as Hasselblad and itself likes to use fanciful and number-packed marketing to attract people at the lower end of the spectrum because people in that range consider specs very carefully and are willing to jump ships very freely if someone else offers a better package.

It’s common to spot them in India but aren’t as famous in western markets as people there have a higher average salary and thus can afford Apple markets. Apple has more than a 50% market share in markets like Japan and USA. What helps their advance in the market is that they have phones in all price brackets with enough distinction between them that people would notice. You can get a 20K One Plus even one for 80K. Nobody in the family uses a One Plus but I once used my friend’s One Plus Nord CE2. I hate to say it but it was very smooth and the animations and transitions were coded in such a way that they felt snappingly fast. One Plus may be at the top right now but they face stiff competition from Samsung ever since the Indian Government has been on a crusade to encourage Indian products and decrease reliance on Chinese goods that have flooded the world. Samsung is not an Indian brand but it operates the world’s largest smartphone factory in India and brings in billions in FDI while employing thousands and a lot of them are females.

One Plus has been on a sort of decline ever since Carl Pei, the founder of One Plus, left the company. He was a true visionary and is often called China’s Mark Zuckerberg. He is currently focusing on his new tech company called Nothing which released its first Nothing Phone 1 a few months back after the initial launch of Nothing Buds. A few problems that One Plus faces are an ongoing government investigation into tax evasion by the company and rising costs of operation thanks to war-driven inflation that has plunged growth forecasts of the world economy and left investors worried and biting nails in fear.

There are reports on One Plus experimenting with foldable and wrap-around screen phones. All of the R&D is currently in very nascent stages of development but they hope to roll out new categories from 2024 onwards when advancement in technology would allow it. People have been speculating about what One Plus would do differently as changes with each new generation of One Plus phones are not only incremental, unlike the 2016 days when every new generation felt like a revolution and a stark departure from its predecessor.

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JAI HIND

Sorry, Indian-Americans. It is not good enough to be the CEO of a Tech Giant now. You have to be the Prime Minister of a former colony. The bar has been raised.

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Just an eccentric and genius billionaire