OnePlus, the country’s second-largest premium smartphone brand, has planned to set up its offline stores in top eight cities of the country and grow presence in the Tata-owned Croma chain of electronic stores, a senior company executive said.
Vikas Agarwal, OnePlus’ General Manager (India) said “The brand has decided to expand offline presence since the pilot with the Bengaluru experience store showed that growth rate was faster in the city since consumers can touch-and-feel the product. Till lately, OnePlus used to sell primarily through Amazon which it will continue.”
The experience stores are built over 5,000 plus square feet of space, while the authorised brand take up 1,000-1,500 square feet of land. Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai, Kolkata and Ahmedabad will be the point of authorised brand stores of OnePlus. It currently operates one such outlet in Mumbai. It is also looking for locations for experience stores in Delhi and Mumbai.
Agarwal said the OnePlus brand is now available in only 20 outlets of Croma but the company intends to launch them in over 100 outlets of the chain.
He said, “The Company is exploring similar partnership with other large format consumer electronics and cellphone retailers in the country who can provide good experience to the consumers.”
OnePlus operates in the Rs 30,000-plus smartphone segment, which is growing at 30% annually and accounts for 3.5% of the country’s total smartphone market. Its main competitors are Apple and Samsung.
As per data from market trackers IDC and Counterpoint Research, OnePlus was the second largest brand in the premium segment after Apple in the October-December quarter, thereby becoming the largest premium Android smartphone maker in India. As per Counterpoint’s last quarter result, Apple had 47% share in the premium segment followed by OnePlus with 25% share and Samsung with 17.6% share. OnePlus overtook Samsung in the July-September quarter.
For OnePlus India has proved to be the largest market for OnePlus, having accounted for over 35% of its global sales of $1.4-billion in 2017, when its global sales had doubled.
Agarwal said, “OnePlus will continue with its strategy of launching one flagship smartphone model a year.”
