The Chinese smartphone maker has officially announced plans to open its first retail store in France this fall, around the OnePlus 6T launch.
OnePlus isn’t announcing new hardware at IFA 2018, but its people are in Berlin to talk just a little bit. In the case of co-founder Carl Pei, he talked with French paper Les Echos about a slight change in its European strategy.
“Our growth is primarily due to worth of mouth.” Pei said.
And that won’t change as far as he sees it. After all, recommendations helped OnePlus make 2017 its best year in sales ever. What has helped in France is a carriage agreement with network Bouygues that’s been in effect for more than a year. The OnePlus 6 will soon be sold at most of the carrier’s 500 stores.
But with only a staff of 1,000 and a limited skill set — even with research, engineering and development, sales and after-sales is still a growing proposition — Pei figures that the company will grow that set with a first-ever permanent retail store in Paris that will open around the launch of the OnePlus 6T. It’s expected as per usual that OnePlus will also launch pop-up events in cities around the world.
Pei says that he isn’t worried about competition coming into its value-based crawl space from corporate cousin OPPO and its Realme brand to Xiaomi launching Pocophone.
“Our most direct competition is us,” he said.
