OnePlus’ co-founder, Pete Lau, has just announced in a forum post that OnePlus and Oppo have integrated a number of their teams together to “better streamline our operations and capitalize on additional shared resources”. Given the positive impact, the company has decided to further integrate with Oppo.

For a quick recap, both OnePlus and Oppo are owned by BBK Electronics. Oppo and OnePlus are sub-brands of the parent company. The new announcement is hardly surprising, given that we’ve seen OnePlus work a lot more closely with the Oppo team in recent years. They’ve not only worked on hardware, but also on the software side of things, as we’ve now come to realise not that long ago.

Pete Lau, the CEO of OnePlus, took on a second role as Oppo’s Chief Product Officer back in May, 2020. The company has changed drastically since, but now, OnePlus is now in the low and mid-range fields competing with the biggest players on the market such as Samsung and Xiaomi, it has made premium high-end devices and has also debuted its first smartwatch. The company has also made significant changes to its beloved operating system, OxygenOS.

This new collaboration will give OnePlus additional resources to further develop its products, according to Lau, “It will also allow us to be more efficient, for example, bringing faster and more stable software updates for OnePlus users”, said in the blog post.

Here’s the official post by Pete Lau:

Hi friends,

Over the past eight years, the OnePlus brand has grown from an exciting newcomer into a global force to be reckoned with. In the premium category, we have been widely recognized in the industry for the quality of our products and the ability to outperform other brands with significantly larger budgets. And among tech enthusiasts like many of you, we have built a large and highly engaged community with a focus on openness and co-creation.

Now, we’re at a turning point for the future of OnePlus. As we’ve begun growing our product portfolio, we’re able to give you more choices than ever before. True to our Never Settle spirit, we want to continue giving you the highest-quality OnePlus experience possible. And to do that, we must adapt as a team and as a brand.

As many of you know, last year I took on some additional responsibilities to oversee product strategy for both OnePlus and OPPO. Since then, we have integrated a number of our teams together with OPPO to better streamline our operations and capitalize on additional shared resources. After seeing positive impact from those changes, we’ve decided to further integrate our organization with OPPO.

I’m confident that this change will be positive for our community and our users. With this deeper integration with OPPO, we will have more resources at hand to create even better products for you. It will also allow us to be more efficient, for example, bringing faster and more stable software updates for OnePlus users.

As for the OnePlus brand – we will continue to operate independently, focused on providing you with the best possible products and experience as we have always done. We will continue launching OnePlus products, holding events (hopefully in person soon) and engaging directly with you for feedback through the same OnePlus channels as before. OnePlus’ commitment to you remains the same.

As always, we wanted to let you – our community – know about this directly from us as soon as we could share the news with you. You are a vital part of the OnePlus family, so it’s important that we communicate changes like this with you directly. Thank you for supporting us over all these years. We can’t do any of this without the OnePlus community.

Never Settle
Pete