OnePlus' plans major expansion, grand goal is to be 'enduring'

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OnePlus slams the grand mission statements of Silicon Valley companies and its grand goal is to be a 'healthy and enduring' company, co-founder Carl Pei said in an interview, adding that the smartphone maker is planning a major expansion.

OnePlus started as a small project with big ideas to "never settle" and to "kill" flagships, asking customers in its early days to smash their current phone and get a OnePlus instead. Since then, the company has doubled down on its mission of making no-compromise flagship devices at reasonable prices (in fact, at half the prices of current Samsung and Apple flagships), and from an initial product run of 50,000 units, it has now sold over 1 million OnePlus 6 phones within just 22 days of the launch.

Co-founder Carl Pei, a university drop-out, who moved to the United States from China at age four, and then moved to Sweden at age six, has been touring Europe these days, negotiating deals with the big carriers as OnePlus is planning a major expansion on the Old Continent. OnePlus is said to be working on deals with carriers for a big launch next year and it is planning to increase the number of employees to 60 in Europe.
 

Yet still, despite its loud marketing in the earliest days, OnePlus follows a humble and sensible grand goal:
 

 

“'To create a healthy and enduring company', that is our goal,” Carl Pei says.

“In Silicon Valley, all the mission statements are very grand,” he says, “but what does it mean to be healthy? To make profits when your competition is losing. And what does it mean to be enduring? Companies that have been around in 50 or 100 years change the world in their own way. If you ask what we want to be in five years, I would just say to still be around. To have survived.”

This almost sounds pessimistic, but considering the incredibly tough competition in the smartphone market and the dynamic changes happening every year, it's a worthy objective.

Yet still, having a grand goal to endure and survive, does not mean that OnePlus will just stand still. The company has just announced a big and bold new bet: it has started work on a OnePlus TV, a new product that it envisions as much smarter than current TVs and one that will connect seamlessly with your phone. It is still in the early stages, but OnePlus plans to launch it in 2019.