OnePlus announces merger with Oppo

OnePlus CEO Pete Lau has announced that the smartphone brand will soon be integrated with Oppo. Pete was recently given a role at Oppo late last year to oversee product planning and experience while retaining his job as CEO at OnePlus.

According to his forum post, he announced that OnePlus is embarking on a new journey to give consumers more choice than ever. In order to continue to provide the highest-quality OnePlus experience, he said the company must adapt as a team and as a brand.

After taking a double role for both OnePlus and Oppo, the two smartphone brands have started integrating a number of teams to better streamline their operations and to capitalise on their shared resources. He said after seeing the positive impact from these changes, they decided to further integrate the company with Oppo.

He assured that after the deeper integration with Oppo, the OnePlus brand will still continue to operate independently and will continue to focus on providing the best possible products and experience as always. You can still expect OnePlus product launches and the brand will continue to hold events and engage with its community through the same OnePlus channels.

He said the integration will allow them to have more resources to create even better products. He also said that the merger will allow them to be more efficient including the ability to roll out faster and more stable software updates for OnePlus users.

From the looks of it, OnePlus will be an independent brand under Oppo which is somewhat similar to Honor-Huawei’s past relationship. It is no secret that OnePlus is closely related to Oppo as both brands are under the same BBK Electronics group. Other smartphone brands under BBK include iQoo, Vivo and Realme.

If you look at the OnePlus lineup, most of them are essentially rehashed Oppo flagship smartphones with different packaging and operating system. Even the Oppo Reno 5 looks like a rehash of the OnePlus Nord.

OnePlus was founded in 2013 by Carl Pei and Pete Lau. Back then, Pete was a former Oppo Vice-President and he denied that OnePlus is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oppo. While he insisted that they are an independent company, a registration document revealed that OnePlus is a fully owned subsidiary under Oppo with 100% funding.

In October last year, co-founder Carl Pei had announced his resignation from OnePlus after 7 years at the company. He then started a new company called Nothing that’s backed by a number of notable tech leaders and investors.

[ SOURCE ]

Related reading