OnePlus keen to retain top spot in premium smartphones

Vikas Agarwal, GM India Operations, OnePlus, said the brand is upbeat about Deepavali sales reflecting the buyers’ sentiment about the product’s growing popularity. With its community base of users and fans widening, the latest launch on Tuesday OnePlus 6T priced at Rs 37,999, is aimed at setting newer benchmarks in the smartphone space. “We believe in incremental updates and our strategy has been to launch a new smartphone every year. We are a four-year brand with no intent on diluting the equity. We don’t see strong competition as few companies launch one product every year,” he said at a media roundtable in New Delhi.

Primarily an online brand that has banked on Amazon so far, OnePlus has expanded its retail reach by tying up with players such as Croma and Reliance. In the US, it is making inroads riding on its latest carrier support with T-Mobile (which has over 5,000 retail outlets there). “We are seeing 15 to 20 per cent of users coming from brand biggies like Samsung and Apple,” Agarwal said, adding a competitive pricing, lean team, lesser distribution costs and a strong after sales support have contributed to the brand’s increasing popularity. Also, the OnePlus community has played a major role in building the visibility.

Apart from two large format experience stores in Bengaluru and Chennai, plans are afoot to add a few more to take the total to five and the number of exclusive stores to 15 by the year-end. “One third of sales comes from India, a big market for the brand. Half of the sales are contributed by Bengaluru, Mumbai and NCR. These three locations account for 50 per cent of our sales. The tech-savvy presence in Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune have led to a 40 per cent contribution while places like Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Kochi generate the balance,” he said.

Agarwal also said the upcoming R&D centre in Hyderabad is in the process of being finalised. “We are a small team which will be scaled but we have not clearly defined the scale that we want to achieve. That would determine the final shape,” he added.

The company will also be hosting pop-up events across 8 Indian cities, including Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Ahmedabad in the coming days.