One Of A Kind

OnePlus almost over looked the Indian market initially. Having corrected its misstep, the Chinese company now gets the maximum share of revenue from the country

- Anshul Dhamija

Four months after starting life from China’s Shenzhen—a mecca of sorts for hardware startups— smartphone maker OnePlus launched its first device in April 2014. The OnePlus One, as the premium gadget was called, was aimed at the US and European markets besides home country China.

At the time, India was nowhere on the radar for founders Pete Lau and Carl Pei, given that the premium segment (smartphones priced above $400 or ₹27,000) accounted for, at best, three percent of overall sales in the country.

But two months after the launch, once concrete sales data started trickling in, the founders had to concede an error of judgement. “Traffic trends [sales data] showed that India ranked among our top seven countries. This, even when we had not launched our product in the country,” recalls Vikas Agarwal, general manager, OnePlus India. “People [from India] were buying from the US and Europe, and these were not even people who were travelling to those regions.”

An internal fact-finding mission revealed that Indians were ordering the OnePlus One from the company’s ecommerce channels in those regions—OnePlus’s business model is built around ecommerce—and getting them shipped to India, bearing the customs duty and shipping charges (around ₹4,000) themselves. Despite the additional costs, “the device was still considered value for money”, recalls Agarwal, who joined OnePlus in October 2014 from​ Ibibo to set up its India operations.

The initially-overlooked Indian market now accounts for over a third of OnePlus’s $1.4-billion revenue, the highest share followed by China, Europe and the US.