In a counter to Xiaomi on Flipkart, OnePlus ties up with Amazon to launch in India

Last week, Xiaomi launched its Redmi Note in India. The smartphone will be sold on India’s leading ecommerce platform Flipkart exclusively. In fact, there’s nowhere else you can buy a Xiaomi phone in India. Flipkart is the exclusive sales front for Xiaomi’s entire range of popular, attractively priced phones with cutting edge specs in the country.

Now, another cool new-age Chinese phone brand, OnePlus has just announced the launch of its first flagship phone, the One in India – and it’s exclusively on Flipkart’s arch US-based rival Amazon, which has an online marketplace in India. This makes it a double-edged rivalry – between the avant garde phonemakers Xiaomi and OnePlus on one hand, and between Flipkart and Amazon on the other.

The ecommerce platform is not the only thing Xiaomi and OnePlus have in common – their sales and marketing strategies are similar, Xiaomi meets only a small fraction of the demand for its phones in India, and that’s why its flash sales get over in minutes or even seconds. OnePlus phones on the other hand can only be bought by invitation – that is, not everyone can buy it, they can only ask to buy it.

Starting today, those interested in buying the One can log onto oneplus.net/in and register their interest for an invite. They will receive invites through OnePlus and Amazon.in starting December 2. The OnePlus and Amazon platforms have been integrated so that invites claimed in a OnePlus account will be used to purchase the device on Amazon.in.

But OnePlus claims to be in India for the long haul. India is the first country outside of its headquarters in China in which OnePlus is setting up a localized service infrastructure, offering phone and walk-in support to users. Its partnership with Amazon also suggests a long term plan.

“We want to provide the best possible experience for our Indian users who have been so supportive of our vision. To do that, we are investing heavily in our Indian operations and partnering with the fastest growing and most admirable e-commerce company in the market, Amazon.in,” Pete Lau, CEO of OnePlus, says in a company statement.

Xiaomi too has a physical office and team in India, headed by Manu Jain, who was a co-founder of Jabong, one of India’s top ecommerce sites. So far, the company has had a dream run in India. Its smartphones have been selling like hot cakes from day one. The only complaint is that the demand has been multiple times higher than what the company could supply in the country. This may have inspired OnePlus to open an India account quickly. The price and tech savvy Indian consumer seems to have taken a hankering for new gen Chinese phones.

Xiaomi has caught the imagination, with its vice-president Hugo Barra, an import from Google in the US, having been on the original Android development team.

OnePlus too comes with a strong tech reputation. Its CEO and founder Pete Lau started out as a hardware engineer at iconic Chinese smartphone maker Oppo, and worked there for 15 years. He was the director of the Blu-Ray division when he quit Oppo at the end of 2013, with a dream to build a smartphone that marries fast, high-end hardware with equally high-end design.

Tony Chen, CEO of OPPO, was a mentor to Pete. In his OPPO farewell note, Pete thanked Tony for it. “OPPO has always and will continue to create exquisite products. Incredible build quality and beautiful design are core strengths of OPPO, and ones that are now deeply integrated in my blood from fifteen years of working here,” he had said.

But he wasn’t satisfied with the smartphones he saw in the market, and set out to start his own company OnePlus. Its flagship phone, the One, draws inspiration from Oppo’s Find 7a, but its high end specs come at a much lower price. That’s a strategy ideally suited for India, as Xiaomi has discovered.

Amazon and Flipkart battle over smartphones

In this new market, Amazon was a natural choice for OnePlus, given the exclusive deals local leader Flipkart has been making first with Motorola and then Xiaomi. According to a statement from Amazon, “combining the product-focused nature of OnePlus with the consumer-focused values of Amazon, the collaboration between these two global companies, equally committed to India,” was important.