OnePlus co-founder confirms new phone coming before the end of the year

Having launched the "2016 flagship killer", OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei revealed that the company is gearing up to launch a second phone before the end of the year.

In an interview with USA Today, Pei confirmed the launch frame of the second phone and said he hopes it could be in time for Christmas. He also shared that the second phone model may or may not be more powerful than the OnePlus 2 and it is an amazing device. Pei reportedly said that the second phone caters to a different type of customer where design is more important than specs.

When asked on the future of the company, Pei states that he only sees three smartphone brands - Apple, Samsung and OnePlus - in the market five years from now. He believes that there is no room for other players in the market.

Pei - "In 5 years I think it will be Apple, OnePlus and Samsung because there's no more room in the market. Everyone else would've died because they couldn't reach the scale they wanted fast enough or they couldn't have a margin to sustain their business. Look at the soft drink space: there are only two players, Pepsi and Coke."

Pei also defended the company's decision to omit NFC from the OnePlus 2 as he feels that the adoption rate of NFC is too low and Android Pay will only gain traction in 12 to 18 months. On the topic of direct low cost sales business model, Pei claims the landscape is changing where advertising is no longer as valuable and good products can still be marketed without a huge budget.

Pei -"The entire landscape was changing. eCommerce is making everything more efficient and ultimately it benefits the consumer. It cuts out the middle man and cuts out a lot of the margins. You can read media and user reviews online. Advertising is diminishing in value and the value of good products is rising because it can be discovered without a huge marketing budget.



I'm sure that if Samsung cut all their stores and cut all the distribution and went direct to consumer they would be able to sell their phone at a lower price than we do. So it's not about making a cheap phone at all."

His business strategy seems to be paying off; the OnePlus 2 received over one million invitation requests from consumers in just three days! It recently held a local media event where it revealed that the OnePlus 2 will be coming to Singapore in Q4 2015 with a price tag of S$538.

Source: USA Today via PhoneArena

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