The manufacturer OnePlus will make a strategic merger towards its sister brand Oppo. The two companies actually belong to the same group and have been competing a bit for the past few years.
OnePlus will join the parent company. The Chinese manufacturer, which has made a name for itself in recent years by marketing high-end phones at knockdown prices, will merge with Oppo, its sister company. Or rather, OnePlus goes ” integrate more [son] organization with that of OPPO Explains CEO Pete Lau, in a message dated June 16, 2021.
Arrived in France in 2014 with the OnePlus One, the manufacturer had made technophiles dream with a high-end technical sheet in a phone sold for less than 300 euros. At the time, the mobile telephony market in France was evolving at the rate of Apple, Samsung, HTC or Motorola and manufacturers like Xiaomi or Oppo had not even officially arrived in many countries yet. The availability of a powerful smartphone at a discounted price was then quite unprecedented beyond Chinese borders.
And for years, OnePlus has continued this momentum, even in France earning the outdated nickname “mobile troublemaker”. But since mid-2018, Oppo has come to play the spoilsport by crossing the Chinese borders, behind which it had remained for a long time, and by launching itself more aggressively at the international level. The border between the two brands then began to crumble.
BBK Electronics, kezako?
Because in reality, the two companies belong to the same group: BBK Electronics. If this name doesn’t ring a bell, that’s okay. The Chinese multinational is rather discreet, but its sectors are less so. OnePlus, Oppo, Vivo, Realme, all these manufacturers who launched internationally a few years ago actually belong to the same group.
All do not release the same phones, BBK preferring to bet on the strategy of “divide and conquer”, but these subsidiaries share part of their R&D and their production chain in order to reduce costs. So much so that some Oppo smartphones look devastatingly like OnePlus smartphones.
In parallel with Oppo’s international development, BBK has started to downsize the OnePlus brand. In April 2020, in the midst of global confinement, OnePlus laid off a large part of its European teams, tightening its presence around a single head office in Helsinki. Oppo meanwhile continued to hammer the European and French market by sponsoring major events like Roland-Garros.
The presence of the two brands on the European continent was starting to be complex as Oppo seemed to be favored by the parent company, to the detriment of OnePlus, which failed to establish itself as a major player in mobile telephony. The rapprochement between the two entities is therefore not exactly a surprise.
What does this mean for OnePlus?
According to Pete Lau, this rapprochement will not change much. ” We will continue to operate independently, focusing on providing you with the best products and experience possible, as we always have. “Swears the CEO, who has taken a step back from OnePlus since last year to gain responsibility at Oppo.
” I am convinced that this change will be positive for our community “, Adds the manager who explains that the sharing of resources and the merger of part of the teams with Oppo will make it possible to have” more resources to create even better products “. Oxygen OS, the in-house implementation of Android, will remain the company’s default operating system, even reassures the CEO. It must be said that Color OS, Oppo’s home OS, is not exactly as neat and successful as the OnePlus system.
Despite the reassuring tone of the message, it is difficult to be very optimistic for OnePlus, which has already suffered from the restructuring of its teams last year. With products increasingly similar to Oppo’s and increasingly aggressive competition from other manufacturers like Xiaomi or Huawei, OnePlus is in a delicate position. This detail has not escaped the fan community who expresses a bit of skepticism about this announcement, as illustrated by a montage created by one of its members.
