Chinese handset maker OnePlus has increased its focus on the Indian market as India has emerged as the company's biggest revenue generator, making over 1/3rd of its total revenue in 2017. Keeping this in mind, OnePlus is aiming to make India its 'second headquarters' by the end of 2018.
The company is planning to establish a full fledged research and development (R&D) facility in India soon and is scouting for locations to establish the centre. Currently, it has a few people working on research at its Bengaluru facility. OnePlus is also planning to have around 14 offline touch points in the country by the end of 2018.
The OnePlus India R&D centre is expected to work on software design and software testing. The centre will also aim at working on customising the software as per the requirements of local market. “We have around 25 per cent market share in India and emerged as the second player in the Indian market in Q1 of the calendar year 2018. We hope to do further well in Q2 as well, for which the numbers are yet to come. The main focus of OnePlus is to work on new innovations and provide customised products keeping in view the customer's requirements in mind. Our major sales are still through the online medium but we are increasing our offline presence too in India. In India, we have outsourced our manufacturing to OPPO at their manufacturing set up at Noida. We are also leveraging Amazon's warehouse facility in India,” said Vikas Agarwal, general manager, OnePlus India.
Agarwal further informed that the Chinese company has never believed in having a large workforce and globally has only about 1000 people. In India too, OnePlus has kept a small workforce and has around 85 people. “Our expertise lies in designing the product and even when we set up our R&D facility in India we will not be hiring large numbers and will mostly restrict the hiring between 25-50 people. Though we are present across 33 countries across the globe including India, China, Europe, and in the US and Canada, we may think of expanding our presence across other countries such as Australia, New Zealand and Africa in the near future. Besides India, even our global sales have been predominantly through the online medium,” explained Agarwal.
Agarwal further added that OnePlus would continue to focus on the online medium to sell its handsets in India but will also keep adding offline touch points to reach out to the large majority of the Indian market that prefer offline stores to get a first hand experience of the product before their purchase. “I feel that the Indian market is also gradually moving towards the premium segment as globally the market is dominated by the premium segment,” said Agarwal.