It seems that every time I open LinkedIn, I see more and more OnePlus (former) employees either posting that it’s their last day at OnePlus or that they’ve already moved on to a new position elsewhere.
We’ve already seen a handful of OnePlus Europe employees posting about losing their position within the company; now, we’re seeing some OnePlus US employees announce that they’ve moved to a new position elsewhere.
This all proves that OnePlus is indeed scaling back. Now, are they going to be closing down worldwide? That’s unlikely, but there are definitely some major changes happening at OnePlus.
From what we’ve been told, OnePlus is planning to pull out of North America and Europe, sticking to India and China. But India will be sticking to mid-range and low-end devices, with OPPO taking care of the flagship phones.
In India, we’ve already seen this play out a bit. OnePlus announced that its Indian customers can now take their phones to OPPO service centers, instead of just OnePlus service centers. And we’ve also seen a few new phones launch in India, all of which are mid-range, so far.
OnePlus is sorta merging with realme
It was also revealed today that OnePlus and realme’s product teams are merging. This news came from Digital Chat Station, which is pretty accurate with their reporting, that OnePlus and realme will merge their global and domestic operations under a new “sub-product center”. Marketing and service for both companies will also be merged.
A separate report from TechLeaksZone says that the newly merged teams will report to Pete Lau, who is the current CEO of OPPO. The report also mentioned that OnePlus and realme will have additional emphasis on the “reuse of product lines”.
This likely means we won’t see such drastic changes between flagships like the OnePlus 15, realme GT8 Pro, and OPPO Find X9 Pro, which we saw last Fall.
This sounds more like consolidation due to redundancy
It always seemed kind of odd to see OPPO, OnePlus, and realme operate as separate companies, despite using the same software across all of their devices. Having three separate marketing teams for virtually the same devices with the same software was likely a whole lot of wasted money. So a lot of this sounds like they are slimming down their numbers to reduce redundancies.
Bringing OnePlus and realme in-house for OPPO is a big deal and a smart move. Having one team product for all three brands (plus their own sub-brands like Nord and Reno) makes a ton of sense. Especially since most smartphone brands don’t make a profit, outside of Samsung and Apple.
So what does this mean for the future of OnePlus and realme? Well, for the US, it’s unlikely that any of these brands will be available in the US, unfortunately. A big part of this is likely due to the current regime in the US, and seeing what happened to Huawei back in 2019. Outside of the US, OPPO will likely take over for all the flagship offerings, with OnePlus focusing more on gaming, and realme focusing more on mid-range and budget phones.
The OnePlus gaming focus seems to be very accurate, with the recent gaming handheld leaks we’ve seen.
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