OnePlus to start Offline Stores in 10 Cities in India

OnePlus a Chinese manufacturer, which entered India three years back, is now planning to expand in India. OnePlus is planning to expand its offline operations in 10 cities by the end of this year. The Shenzhen-headquartered company started its operations in India in December 2014. And has primarily been an online-only brand. OnePlus will continue to sell its device on it online sales partner Amazon India and its own portal in the country.

In an interview, OnePlus General Manager Vikas Agrawal told IANS. “We will continue to focus on these two portals as our primary sales channels, but, going forward. We will be going offline in the top 10 cities where we are looking forward to opening our own stores,”.

He also added,”We are not going through a traditional offline channel. We will be opening our own stores and focusing on providing an experience. Which should help us increase awareness in those cities”.

OnePlus has started its first “experience store” in India in Bengaluru last year and contemplates expanding them to metro cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and other major cities by the end of 2018.

In the same interview, Agrawal also said that they are as big as Apple. “We are almost as big as Apple in India now, which is currently the market leader in the premium segment,” Agarwal added.

During 2017, OnePlus grew by a staggering 1,116 percent in the premium smartphone segment as it further strengthened its robust performance in the Indian online market.

OnePlus is growing day by day in India. The company has captured 47.3 percent of the premium smartphone market share and shipped 287,000 in the fourth quarter of 2017. According to the International Data Corporation’s (IDC) “Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker”.

“We ‘ll focus on increasing the presence at e-retailer Croma stores”, said Agrawal. “We recently partnered with Croma and are present in over 20 Croma stores. This year, we are going to expand our presence in the entire 100 stores that Croma has across different cities,” the company executive said.

OnePlus is expecting to continue to grow at a faster pace than the industry and the premium market. We expect OnePlus to outperform the market,” Agarwal reiterated.

“If we talk about last year, OnePlus growth was more than 1,000 percent compared to the previous year (2017 vs 2016), according to Counterpoint Research,” he added

The company believes that the next big trends in the smartphone market would be enterprise-grade security and said it has already started working towards that. “We have a ‘files safety’ feature which makes the files in your device secure. And this is something which, I feel, would gain traction,” Agarwal said. The company has introduced a feature called “LockBox” which secures files so that no one can use them without getting access from the device owner. “Going forward, we will focus more on providing security in our devices,” Agarwal added.

The company is currently setting up its own exclusive service centre network in the country. “We currently have 10 service centres operational and we are looking to open more this year,” the executive said.

OnePlus is soon going to launch its new flagship that is OnePlus 6. It is being said that OnePlus 6 is going to launch in the month of April or May. Everyone Including us is very excited to see what this new flagship will look like. And what new features you ‘ll get to see in the smartphone. If all the rumors are true then you will be getting one of the best smartphones of the year. Also, it will be fun to see how other competitors react to OnePlus 6. Till then all we can do is wait.

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