OnePlus

Under the Radar — Week In China

2 Comments / August 11, 2020

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When Google launched its email service in 2004, only people who had been invited to join the network could open Gmail accounts. The invite-only system made Gmail appear exclusive, so naturally more people wanted in. But it wasn’t a marketing ploy. Gmail had to limit membership because it didn’t have sufficient infrastructure to provide the service for everyone.

When OnePlus, a fast-growing Chinese smartphone brand, debuted in 2014, it adopted a similar tactic. Co-founder Carl Pei explained: “The invite system allowed us to scale our operations and manage our risks to help us grow more sustainably.” Essentially, it meant the four year-old company avoided overstocking. But, as with Gmail, by keeping the phone ‘exclusive’, it helped generate buzz.

This week OnePlus launched its seventh iteration, the OnePlus Six. Although it ditched the invite-only sales system in 2016, the company still keeps tight control over its distribution, forcing most purchases to be made online. But in India, where OnePlus made 35% of its total $1.4 billion in sales in 2017, the company has opened 10 physical stores to help sales and aftercare.

Vikas Agarwal, general manager at OnePlus India, claims OnePlus is now the “biggest Android premium smartphone brand” in the country. According to Counterpoint Research, the third and fourth most popular brands in India last year were Vivo and Oppo. Despite being competitors, the three brands are all linked to one man: Duan Yongping, the founder of BBK Electronics.

BBK (or Bu Bu Gao) was set up by Duan in 1995. It was the second household name Chinese brand Duan has created.

Born in 1961, Duan joined Zhongshan Yihua Group in Guangdong province in 1989 as the manager of a small factory. He used his position to establish a unit called Subor, which produced video game consoles in competition with Japan’s Nintendo.

The most memorable product made by Subor was an educational console, which featured a computer keyboard with ports for data cartridges and a couple of adjoining game controllers. The cartridges stored video recorded lessons to enable students to learn the English language by responding to prompts using the controllers.

The cheap console gave many young Chinese an introduction to computing and its popularity was reflected in Subor’s finances. When Duan joined Yihua it was Rmb2 million in debt, but by 1995 annual profit had exceeded Rmb1 billion ($157 million).

Despite the success Duan was only earning a meagre salary. He had lobbied Zhongshan Yihua to spin off Subor and give him a stake in the new enterprise, but he was rejected. It became a very public business dispute. The outcome: Duan left and founded BBK, taking a few promising team members with him.

Given his frustrations at Subor, Duan made sure he carved out a sizeable 70% stake in BBK for himself. The company began producing audio-visual products such as VCD and DVD players.

In 1999 and 2000, Duan became the highest bidder on state broadcaster CCTV’s annual auction of its prime-time advertising slots, splashing out Rmb300 million. The huge gamble paid off. BBK became a household name and subsequently the leading maker of VCD players.

Duan was quick to see the potential of mobile phones and later the mobile internet. BBK’s Oppo and Vivo were initially derided as cheap imitations of Apple’s iPhone. But through smart marketing the pair became amongst the country’s best-selling smartphones (see WiC358 for our analysis of Oppo’s rise). In 2016, sales of the two brands actually bumped the iPhone out of China’s top three positions.

More than a decade earlier Duan had spoken to Harvard China Review about his business philosophy: “I am never afraid to follow others. Actually my business has never been an initiator of an industry. Instead, we analyse vulnerabilities of the leading companies in a certain industry and then try to establish our own stronghold.”

This ethos likely contributed to the establishment of OnePlus, which was co-founded in 2013 by Oppo’s former vice president Pete Lau. The company drew comparisons to Xiaomi at its launch, because both produced low-price premium smartphones with sales made exclusively online.

Lau was an early BBK employee, joining in 1998. According to Medium, Lau paid a visit to his mentor and former boss Duan to seek advice before initiating OnePlus. Duan’s pedagogical stature is one of the many reasons he’s sometimes dubbed “the Chinese Warren Buffet” and why Lau looked for his backing.

Peter Fuhrman, founder and chairman of Shenzhen-based advisory firm China First Capital, has followed Duan’s business career and admires what he has achieved. As he points out, “No one has succeeded for so long, or so well, in such a brutally tough global industry as Mr Duan. He’s earned a spot among the business immortals of the past century. Only he and Samsung managed the transition that left Blackberry, Nokia, Sony Mobile, Motorola as roadkill. He rose to the top originally by making simple, cheap feature phones, then more or less chucked that whole business away to create and back three new companies for the smartphone industry, Oppo, Vivo and OnePlus. All are doing outstandingly well. Their success is built on another aspect at which Duan excels as few, if any ever have – creating a hugely-efficient, high-quality manufacturing base in Dongguan turning out phones for all three, backed by what may well be the world’s most efficient global electronics supply chain.”

Duan is evidently happy to be compared with Buffett. In 2006, he paid $620,100 to have lunch with the Sage of Omaha. Duan told media after the charity luncheon, “I had already learned a lot from Buffett, so I was hoping for a chance to thank him.”

Having emigrated to the US in 2001, Duan has been taking a more active interest in managing his own money, rapidly growing his equity portfolio.

An initial investment was a $2 million cash injection into NetEase. The firm had almost gone bust following the dotcom crash and its share price had plummeted to just $0.80. According to China Investor, Duan determined that the company still had potential, so he took the plunge. Within two years he’d made a return of 100-times on his investment.

Duan also made a large investment in GE after its shares slumped following the 2008 financial crisis, buying shares at $6 each and quickly doubling his money.

His steely nerves ensured he held onto his stake in Kweichow Moutai when the baijiu maker’s stock price halved in 2014. Duan entered at Rmb180 in 2012; today Moutai trades at over Rmb700.

“The money I’ve earned on the back of investments is so much more than what I earned from 10 years of doing business,” he surmised. According to the latest Hurun report, Duan is now worth $1.3 billion – but there are some in China who think his wealth could be many multiples of that Hurun estimate, and he might even be one of China’s richest men.

It’s hard to know: many of his investments aren’t public. But in Chinese business circles few would disagree that he is shrewd at finding and backing talent.

For instance, also present at the 2006 Buffett lunch was Colin Huang Zheng, who would later found Pinduoduo, one of China’s 164 unlisted unicorns. The e-commerce platform has been described as the fastest growing app in the history of the Chinese internet (see WiC404), and Huang has long been viewed as a key Duan protégé.

“He is above all a great manager and motivator of people, of putting strong people in leadership positions and then letting them get on with their business, with minimal intervention from him at the top,” comments China First Capital’s Fuhrman. “From hands-on executive to hands-off semi-retired chairman, Duan has excelled across his career in very different roles.”

Despite his successes in the business and investment fields, it seems Duan would rather be remembered for his altruism, claiming “Charity is my business, investment is my hobby.” In 2005, Duan and his wife established the Enlight Foundation, through which they’ve provided scholarships to their respective alma maters. In 2006, Duan and NetEase founder Ding Lei made a $40 million donation to Zhejiang University.

But surprisingly the two people who likely won’t be receiving handouts from the magnate are his children. According to Phoenix News, Duan has said: “So much of my happiness in life has come from the process of earning my wealth. I don’t want to deny my children that same happiness.”

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As published by Week in China

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The Economist Survey on China Business

Leave a Comment / June 25, 2016

Econ

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With a timing that can only be described as exquisite, the Economist today publishes their in-depth survey of business in China. It appears at a time when the media is brimming with stories, often in my view overblown,  about China’s economic problems and challenges. The Economist survey provides light where there’s been way too much heat of late. I couldn’t recommend more highly taking the time to read it in full.

Please click here to go direct to the survey on the Economist website. It includes nine separate articles, each offering a banquet of analysis, ideas and insights on where China’s economy, both private sector and SOE, is heading.

The author of the survey is Vijay Vaitheeswaran, the China business and finance editor. This is the first Economist China business survey in many years. It was certainly no small undertaking. China’s size, complexity and ever-morphing business environment make a comprehensive future-looking summary of this kind difficult in the extreme to do well.

I got to meet Vijay during his research phase. I took him for Tibetan food in Shenzhen. He ended up quoting me briefly in one of the articles in the survey.

Vijay paid particular attention to accelerating innovation cycles in China’s hardware industry. He spent a few days in Shenzhen including attending a kind of hacker forum for hardware geeks. He calls Shenzhen “the world’s best place to start a hardware firm” and visited my favorite exemplar of this, 18-month-old mobile phone brand OnePlus.

Quick aside, since the launch of its new model, the OnePlus 2 six weeks ago, the waiting list to buy one has grown to over five million people. If OnePlus’s factories can keep pace with the exploding demand, the company is on track to sell over $2 billion of phones in coming twelve months.

While overall highly positive about China’s economic prospects and the ambitions of its vast pool of private sector entrepreneurs, the survey sounds a note of caution. It argues that the less efficient state-owned sector appears more and more like an unevolved creature from a foregone era.  They are, the survey warns, sucking up too much of China’s capital and achieving too little with it, all the while fighting to maintain the cozy monopolies that keep the far more dynamic and efficient private sector shut out.

How much market? How much government control and ownership? All countries struggle to find a balance. China stands out because the private sector has come so far so fast. Thirty years ago when I first set foot in China there was no private sector to speak of. Now, in all but the so-called “commanding heights” of China’s economy, entrepreneurs run rampant. 1.4 billion Chinese benefit from this fact every day.

 

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China’s Most Successful Startup?

Leave a Comment / June 24, 2016

 

Nikkei

OnePlus Never Settle

China’s most successful startup?

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Ask people in China to name the country’s most successful and innovative new mobile phone brand and most will immediately declare Xiaomi. Ask tech-savvy Americans and Europeans and they will just as quickly suggest OnePlus. Though largely still unknown in China, Shenzhen-headquartered OnePlus, established less than 18 months ago, has achieved more success more quickly in US and European markets than any other Chinese mobile phone company. It is also possibly the China’s most successful startup since Xiaomi was established five years ago.

OnePlus, by my estimate, has now joined the most exclusive club in the technology world, a “unicorn”, meaning technology startups with a valuation of over $1 billion. Other Chinese unicorns besides Xiaomi are China’s Uber, Kuaidi Dache and group buying site Meituan. Unlike those other Chinese companies, OnePlus has not yet raised any money from venture capitalists.   OnePlus is also the only truly international Chinese unicorn, since most of its sales and growth are outside China.

With just a tiny amount of seed capital,  the company began selling its phones little more than a year ago in late April 2014. Its 2014 full-year revenues were $300mn, well behind Xiaomi’s $12 billion.  But, unlike Xiaomi, OnePlus chose to focus its efforts on the US, Western Europe and India. In these places, OnePlus is doing far better than Xiaomi, and is now considered a legitimate competitor to major international Android phone brands like Korea’s Samsung, Taiwan’s HTC, Japan’s Sony and America’s Google Nexus. OnePlus is cheaper than these others, but that doesn’t seem to be the main reason its winning customers as well as enthusiastic reviews from experts. It’s mainly because of the quality of both OnePlus’s hardware and Android software.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the One Plus phone is “exceptional” and it “beats Apple iPhone 6 and Samsung Galaxy S5 in many ways.” The New York Times has called the OnePlus phone “fantastic, about the fastest Android phone you can buy, and its screen is stunning “.  Time Magazine chimed in with OnePlus is “exactly how a smartphone should be.” Engadget, the widely-read US technology blog, recently rated the best phones to buy in the US. Oneplus came out on top. That’s certainly a first for a Chinese brand.

Engadget smartphone rankingIn my seven years as an investment banker in China and before that as CEO of a California venture capital firm, I’ve never met quite such a mold-breaking company. OnePlus set out to achieve what no other Chinese company has ever done, to excel not just at making low-cost fast-to-market products but making ones of the highest quality, in engineering and design, hardware and software.

They next did something else no Chinese, and few American companies have done successfully: use social media sites Twitter, Facebook and Youtube to market its products at almost zero cost, and build a brand with a high reputation and a growing band of loyal customers and followers in the US and European markets.

Both Xiaomi and OnePlus say they plan to make most of their money from selling services and software, not from selling phones. Xiaomi has the advantage of much larger scale, with far more users. But, OnePlus may actually do better with this strategy and make more money for the simple reason that in the US and Europe, compared to China, a lot of people are accustomed to paying for mobile software and services.

OnePlus sold over one million phones last year between May and December, mainly in the US and Europe. It spent a total of about $10,000 on advertising worldwide. Samsung, by contrast, spends over $350mn a year in the US advertising its mobile phones. Worldwide, Samsung is spending over $14bn in advertising and its mobile phone market share has been declining since 2013.

On many fundamental levels, OnePlus thinks and acts differently than any other successful startup in China. Start with its two founders, Pete Lau and Carl Pei. They met while working at a Chinese domestic mobile phone and Blu-ray player manufacturer called Oppo. Lau is responsible for OnePlus’s manufacturing and product engineering, including overseeing a network of outsourced suppliers and manufacturers in and around Shenzhen. “We want to tell the world: Chinese products are great,” Lau says.

Pei’s background is more unusual. He is responsible for the company’s international growth and unique marketing strategy.  Everything about Pei – his background, his way of thinking and his approach to selling mobile phones successfully in the US and Europe – sets him well apart from all other Chinese tech entrepreneurs I’ve met. He is ethnically Chinese, but before coming to Shenzhen three years ago, had never lived or worked in China and his Chinese language ability, by his own admission, is so-so. Now 25, Pei was raised mainly in Sweden.

To understand Pei’s approach to business, it’s useful to understand something about business and culture in Sweden. It’s a small country, with less than 10 million people and fewer than 17,000 Chinese. Yet, it has arguably produced more innovative, world-changing companies, per capita, than any other country in the world. There’s a long list of them. My five favorites are furniture retailer IKEA, milk packaging company Tetra-Pak, bearing manufacturer SKF, fashion retailer H&M and music streaming company Spotify. In each case, these companies now dominate entire industries, with high-quality products and fair prices. Sweden has no real luxury brands. Instead it has a lot of great companies that have changed the ways a huge mass of people across the world live their lives, from the milk they drink to the beds they sleep on, the clothes they wear and now even the music they pay to listen to.

Sweden’s last attempt at success in mobile phones ended up badly. Ericsson once had a decent business selling basic phones, but the birth of smartphones was the death of Ericsson’s mobile business. OnePlus stands a better chance, in part because it’s a mix of Swedish focus on targeting a mass customer market together with Chinese speed and adaptability. I expect to see more of these “mixed blood” companies emerging in China, as China becomes more globalized and more welcoming to non-natives immigrating to start new businesses.

By basing itself in Shenzhen, OnePlus sits inside the world’s most densely-packed ecosystem of component, chip and contract manufacturing companies. It’s hard to imagine OnePlus could have been built as successfully anywhere else in the world. Foxconn, manufacturer of iPhones, is among the companies with its China base in Shenzhen.  Intel has also moved in in force to win business from these small, nimble Chinese electronics companies.

Manufacturing smartphones in Shenzhen is comparatively easy. Far harder is convincing Americans to buy a mobile phone without a subsidy and a service contract from a network provider like Verizon or AT&T. Yet, OnePlus is so far succeeding.  One reason: other companies that tried ended up spending millions of dollars on advertising to try to explain to Americans why they should buy a phone directly. It was mainly burned money. OnePlus spent nothing on advertising but used Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and Youtube to build up a group of early adopters, who then went out and evangelized their friends.

OnePlus has 1.1mn “likes” on Facebook, double Xiaomi’s, along with four times as many followers on Twitter. On Youtube, the Oneplus channel has five times more subscribers than Xiaomi. Keep in mind Youtube, Twitter and Facebook are banned in China, where all of OnePlus’s employees are. OnePlus has become an expert at selling and brand-building using websites OnePlus’s own team aren’t supposed to even be looking at.

Ask Carl how he figured out how to do things in the US market that American companies, including hundreds with millions of dollars in VC money, weren’t able to do and he just shrugs, like it was all pretty easy. OnePlus still has no office in the US, no staff there, no repair centers, nothing. In the beginning you could only buy a OnePlus in the US and Europe with an invitation. Even with one, OnePlus only accepted orders from new customers one day a week, on Tuesdays.  As OnePlus’s reputation grew, the invitations became themselves valuable commodities. They still sell on eBay for $10-$20 each. OnePlus is now gradually loosening up and letting those without an invitation buy its phones, but again, only one-day-a-week, on Tuesdays.

Selling by invitation only may seem counterproductive. But, it’s proved vital to OnePlus’s success up to now. The reason: making mobile phones is generally a very cash-intensive business, since you need to have huge amounts of working capital to buy parts, build phones, supply to retail channels, and then wait for cash to return. OnePlus had no access to a big pot of working capital. So they have basically built phones to order, after the customer has paid.

One-third of the OnePlus’s 400 staff, including about 50 non-Chinese, are dedicated to customer service, which mainly means answering emails and responding to comments and questions on the company’s website and forums. This is another core thing OnePlus does better than any company I’ve seen in China. It’s establishing a new idea in the US and Europe about what a Chinese company is and does. Not just a source of cheap manufactured goods, but a company with a clear and powerful brand identity, one knows how to communicate well and sell things to college-educated 20-30 year-olds who live in San Francisco, Berlin and London.

Success has come quickly, but Pei, from my discussion over dinner with him, is certainly not complacent. He sees risks everywhere, not only from the obvious examples of Nokia and Blackberry, two once world-conquering mobile phone companies that have all but disappeared from the market. Apple remains very powerful. It and Google also own a lot of the key intellectual property patents for mobile phone signal processing, software and chip design. If either chooses to sue OnePlus, they have far more money to fight a patent lawsuit in a US court. Legal fees could easily top $20mn, money OnePlus does not now have. The US patent law system has been abused before, a big company sues a small but fast-growing one, not because it has a good legal case, but knowing that fighting the lawsuit, paying the legal bills, can put this new competitor out of business.

Pei’s three burning concerns are the OnePlus fails to attract enough talented global executives to join the company, loses its edge in designing hardware and software, or grows too large to maintain its quirky brand image and identity. OnePlus is in the process of opening new offices and moving key people from Shenzhen to Bangalore and Berlin because Pei believes it will be easier to find talented staff there.

Another worry, surprisingly, is how and when to bring in venture capital investors. OnePlus will likely try to raise money from one of the world’s famous Silicon Valley VCs. They have the most experience investing in disruptive businesses, helping startups like OnePlus to grow, especially in the US market, and they also can provide lots of help finding top executives and distribution partners. But, these Silicon Valley VCs have also not seen anything exactly like OnePlus before, a Chinese startup, likely with some core operations in India, and a magical ability to sell to Americans without having any Americans involved.  If successful, OnePlus could have one of the largest Series A VC rounds in history, raising perhaps $100mn-$200mn. Will money spoil the company or improve it?

OnePlus’s revenues are on track to more than triple this year to over $1 billion. But, there are lots of places where OnePlus could stumble and fall. Its new model launches and software upgrades could get delayed. Cost pressures could force them to raise prices in the US as they recently had to do in Europe, because of steep fall in the Euro. Also, US and European early-adopters are a fickle bunch. They could start throwing bricks at OnePlus instead of kisses. Case in point, in less than two years, Taiwanese mobile phone company HTC went from the most talked-about and fastest-growing company in the industry to an also-ran.

China’s mobile phone industry, as well as much of the TMT sector, have a reputation for being not much more than a bunch of knock-off artists, with no real innovation worthy of the name. OnePlus and Xiaomi both point the way towards a different and better future for China industry. Yes, OnePlus is good at assembling components cheaply. But, its core strengths as a company are too rarely found in China: an obsessive focus on product design, product quality, branding and customer engagement. These are what determine a company’s value as well as competitive strength. OnePlus is the first Chinese company to gain a large number of buyers and fans in the US and Europe by being simultaneously good at all these.

China’s long-term economic competiveness requires that more companies like OnePlus emerge. But, until it came along, China didn’t have a single one. It’s the most concrete sign that China may transition away from being a source of copy-cat products sold cheap and begin to play in the global big leagues, generating buzz while competing and taking market share from large, rich incumbents like Google and Samsung.

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http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/China-s-most-successful-startup

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