OnePlus sinks and becomes an OPPO tool man

Original debut | Golden Horn Finance (ID: F-Jinjiao)

Author | Lin Shi

New energy vehicle manufacturers are tearing up, and mobile phone manufacturers are not willing to be lonely.

At the OnePlus Ace 2 Pro press conference held last week, Li Jie, president of OPPO OnePlus China, put a cruel sentence, "Don't walk into this arena gently." The PPT of the press conference was directly put on the classic comparison chart, comparing the sales ratio of the OnePlus Ace series and the "friendly K series".

It almost hit Redmi on the screen.

Screenshot of OnePlus Ace 2 Pro press conference

This time the dispute was for a reason. The day before the release of the latest model, the K60 Extreme Edition, Redmi labeled it as a "post-performance era", claiming to "say goodbye to simple hardware stacking and say goodbye to infinite involution of parameters."

On the day of the Redmi conference, OnePlus released an almost-for-tat slogan on the official Weibo, "Only the strongest mobile phone chip that can be selected on this planet will be selected", "Exclusive graphics chip, game superframe, that is the selling point of the previous generation", pointing directly to Redmi K60 Supreme Edition.

Originally positioned as "not going to be", but frequently "touching porcelain" Red Rice, which is known for its cost performance, is on the surface another normal price involution in the sluggish state of the mobile phone market, but in fact, OnePlus has become OPPO's tool to attack the mid-end market.

And this big war in the mid-market has just begun.

Strange OnePlus

For onePlus users, OnePlus has become much stranger than ever.

In 2013, Liu Zuohu, who had worked for OPPO for more than 15 years, left to start OnePlus after receiving permission from OPPO founder and CEO Chen Mingyong. At that time, there was also an episode that Xiaomi founder Lei Jun once forwarded Liu Zuohu's Weibo, welcoming the latter to join the Internet mobile phone camp. Liu Zuohu's reply was, "I don't know what an Internet mobile phone is." Lei Jun then deleted the retweet.

At that time, the first generation of Xiaomi's mobile phone "born for fever" had just been on the market for two years, and Honor had just been hatched from Huawei's product line, and OnePlus chose a rather special path: only build flagship phones, with internationalization as a breakthrough.

OnePlus almost followed the route planned by Liu Zuohu. After the release of OnePlus mobile phone 1, when domestic mobile phones have not yet set their sights abroad, Liu Zuohu has brought OnePlus to the San Francisco development conference. A number of foreign media have unexpectedly published mobile phone reviews from China for the first time, "It's hard to imagine a better phone for Android geeks" (it's hard to imagine such a phone for Android enthusiasts).

By 2017, OnePlus' annual sales were US$1.4 billion (about 10 billion yuan), with more than 70% of its sales coming from overseas markets. Counterpoint data shows that in 2018, OnePlus ranked among the top five in the global high-end smartphone market share (priced at more than $400), and is one of the fastest growing brands in the high-end mobile phone market.

OnePlus gained more than 20% market share in Finland in 2021, source: Weibo "Liu Zuohu"

However, everything began to take a sharp turn in 2020.

In September 2020, Liu Zuohu officially returned to OPPO as senior vice president of Oujia Holdings and the general head of the company's product line, but still served as the CEO of OnePlus; The following year, OPPO and OnePlus announced the merger, and Li Jie, the former head of user operations of OPPO China, will become the president of OnePlus China.

The transformation of OnePlus followed.

In order to compete for the mass market, the one-plus OS operating system, which was originally loved by the "machine party", has been preset by OPPO's color os system since the OnePlus 9 series in 2021.

In the same year, the "people-friendly model" OnePlus 9R series was launched, which once exceeded the sales of the flagship model of the digital series, but suffered bad reviews because the latest online operating system failed to adapt to the model in the first time. So much so that the new weekly Weibo even used "OnePlus in 2021, what "evil" did it do?" "Come and ask for comments.

Coming to 2022, OnePlus continues to "sink", launching the OnePlus Ace series of mobile phones, which is mainly e-sports mobile phones, compared with the digital series flagship sold at 3999 yuan, the price has dropped to 2499 yuan.

By this year, OnePlus simply removed a series of labels such as independent, niche, and high-end. The Ace2 model released in February took the initiative to label itself as "ultimate cost performance" for the first time. At the same time, the target is aimed at the famous cost-effective Redmi flagship mobile phone K60 series, two of the three configuration models are lower than the price of the K60 model of the same configuration, and even forced Redmi to announce a price reduction on the release day of OnePlus Ace2.

Many years ago, "ultimate cost performance" was used by OnePlus users to praise the conscience of OnePlus, and Liu Zuohu disagreed, "Sometimes I communicate with users, and some users directly tell me that they think OnePlus's cost-effective is the best, I say you stop me, don't mention the cost performance to me, I hate to mention the cost performance." ”

I don't know, this counts as if we will eventually live as the people we hate the most.

OPPO keeps the market's tool man

After the transformation, OnePlus won in sales.

After the release of Ace2 at the beginning of the year, OnePlus soon announced its results on its official website, "Jingdong Tmall's first-day sales exceeded the sales of friend A and friend B's first-sale day sales by twice the sales of friend A and friend B!" Become the 2022-2023 first-day sales champion of all Android phones! ”。

Driven by the sales of the Ace series, in the first half of 2023, OnePlus' sales increased by a staggering 335% year-on-year.

Of course, this aspect also confirms how much the original OnePlus lived a suffocating life.

This brand, which was not well known at the beginning, did not exceed 10 million units for the first time until 2021. In contrast, Xiaomi's shipments this year were 191 million units, of which Redmi, which focuses on the low-end market, accounted for the lion's share, accounting for 83.6% of Xiaomi's total sales, according to data released by CINNO Research in May 2022.

Now that feng shui takes turns, OnePlus chooses to compromise, and finally can participate in the card tables of first-line mobile phone brands.

This is also a small goal of completing OPPO.

At the beginning of Liu Zuohu's return to OPPO, he was once questioned by the outside world whether to give up the OnePlus brand. As a result, at last year's 9th anniversary event, Liu Zuohu announced that OPPO OnePlus officially opened a dual-brand strategy, OPPO will invest 10 billion in OnePlus in the next three years, and OnePlus will enter OPPO's more than 5,000 offline stores nationwide and share more than 1,000 after-sales outlets.

Li Jie said that he should achieve the first place in the online market of more than 2,000 yuan within 3 years, so "the comprehensive net profit margin of hardware can be 0 within 3 years."

Throwing money, giving technology, supply chain, and channels, the goal is to cut into the mid-end market through OnePlus and maintain OPPO's market share.

OnePlus 9th anniversary press conference, Liu Zuohu on stage to give a speech, source: screenshot of the press conference

After all, OPPO's sense of crisis is too strong.

Over the past few years, OPPO has been deeply cultivating the sinking market for a long time, and has established a huge offline system by expanding its franchise, which has been able to complete the counterattack against Xiaomi and Huawei in one fell swoop. However, the emergence of the epidemic has exposed OPPO's lack of online channel construction.

In the past three years, OPPO's share in the domestic mobile phone market has been closely related to the offline situation, with a market share of 16% in 2020, rebounding to 20.5% in 2021, and falling to 16.8% in 2022.

At the same time, OPPO is trying to hit the high-end market, but both the Find X series and folding screen mobile phones have not improved. On the contrary, OnePlus, which has been hitting the high-end market for many years, has become its own person who collided with OPPO.

In addition, OPPO's realme sub-brand, which was once successful through stacking and low-price strategies, was established in 2018 and exceeded 100 million in global sales in 2021, becoming the fastest brand in history with more than 100 million units. However, realme, which has high hopes, can not get rid of the low-price label, and the mid-to-high-end models launched by testing the water are also tepid.

Today, OnePlus directly shoulders the heavy responsibility of "card position" Redmi. In February this year, OnePlus released the Ace2 model, and for the first time took the initiative to label itself as "ultimate cost performance" - this was once a magic weapon to help Redmi win the mobile phone market.

OnePlus Ace2 is targeting Redmi's flagship mobile phone Redmi K60. Two of the three configuration models are lower than the price of the same configuration model of K60, of which the starting price of the 12GB+256GB Ace 2 model is only 2799 yuan, compared with the price of the same configuration model of Redmi K60 is 2999 yuan, the price difference is 200 yuan.

The Redmi K60 Extreme Edition and OnePlus Ace2 pro were both released in August, with Redmi first and OnePlus second. But this time, OnePlus failed to stage another surprise attack on price. Redmi has achieved the ultimate in price involution, the lowest configuration of Redmi K60 Extreme Edition 12G + 256G is priced at only 2599 yuan, while the lowest price of the same configuration of OnePlus Ace2 pro is 2999 yuan.

Li Jie soon tweeted, "Don't give up the world to mediocre products," pointing the finger at Redmi. In his Weibo, he defined OnePlus as "product power priority", and compared the Redmi K60 Extreme Edition with some configurations of OnePlus Ace2 pro, saying that "it will not be castrated everywhere in invisible places that users can see in order to make a cheap price", implying that Redmi belongs to the "card price priority".

For OPPO, OnePlus that can carry out a "dimensionality reduction blow" to the mid-end market has become OPPO's last hope to retain market share.

Dilemma

OPPO's strategy seems to have worked well.

The just-released pre-sale of the OnePlus ACE2 Pro is said to have broken Android records, and in the first half of this year, OPPO has regained the first place in China's mobile phone market share for two consecutive quarters.

But for both OPPO and OnePlus, the awkward situation remains.

The digital series, originally a flagship model, has been stolen by the Ace series, which was released in the mid-range market. For example, if the Redmi K60 series far exceeds the Xiaomi digital series in terms of sales and sales. OnePlus, which has lost its autonomy, is highly dependent on OPPO from supply chain, channels to funds, and once the digital series becomes a chicken rib, it is likely to one day become an outcast.

After all, for OPPO, compared to a tool person, the Find X series and folding screen that are also working in the high-end market are the real sons.

It's all good to say that you don't have a personality, but you win sales in the end. But without autonomy, the "dual-brand" pie will not be able to round after all.

Liu Zuohu at the OPPO Find X6 press conference, source: screenshot of the conference

At the same time, whether to let go of the mid-range market to OnePlus to fight is still a question worth thinking about by OPPO.

On the one hand, the involution of the mid-market has become a trend, and OPPO may need to provide more and more ammunition.

In the past two years, a large number of original flagship and sub-flagship configurations have been successively delegated to mid-range machines, such as the nova 11 series released by Huawei in the second quarter, satellite communications, Kunlun glass, variable aperture, which were once exclusive to the high-end Mate series, have all been decentralized. More similar operations may appear in various mobile phone manufacturers.

The Snapdragon 8+ chip, originally used in the flagship mobile phone, was used in the mid-range machine this year, and 12GB memory and even 24GB running memory, 512GB or even 1TB of large memory may become the standard for mid-range machines.

At the same time, under the reality that the technical bottleneck has not yet been broken, the homogenization of hardware may lead to the final decision of the price involution. And this happens to be where OnePlus lacks sufficient competitiveness.

Whether OPPO has the confidence to support a price war has become a question.

At the same time, when the offline market recovers, it is still unknown how much help OnePlus, as an independent brand and has been in the e-commerce market for a long time, can bring to OPPO, which has been rooted in the offline.

A shot in the arm is good, but if the investment in OnePlus does not bring long-term value to OPPO, the end is destined to be unhappy.

Resources:

Slow down "OnePlus "Red Rice", Xiaomi is going to be uncomfortable"

New Extract Business Review "OnePlus That Can't Go Back"

Times Weekly "Li Jie at the helm of OnePlus for 800 days: don't play machine sea tactics, just want to "roll" products"