OnePlus celebrates 1.5 million OnePlus One smartphones sold

OnePlus is celebrating 1.5 million smartphone sales of its debuted OnePlus One smartphone over the past year.

Twenty-five-year-old OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei sat down with the Wall Street Journal recently to talk about the beginning of OnePlus as a company, his humble beginnings, and the vision he has with fellow co-founder Pete Lau. Pei says that he dropped out of college life after three years (and never got his college degree), not to mention his business he ran prior to giving in to his parents’ wish for him to pursue education. He worked at smartphone manufacturer Oppo before pitching an idea to Pete Lau about how he wanted to “change the world.”

Pete Lau also worked for Oppo at the time (he hired Carl Pei to work for Oppo), and left with Pei to found OnePlus. Last April (2014), the Chinese manufacturer sold its OnePlus One smartphone. “One of the reasons why we started this company was, we looked at all the Android phones on the market and there wasn’t one phone that was good enough for ourselves to use,” Pei said. “The number one mission is not to make a cheap phone, but to make the best one out there,” responding to the stereotype that not all Chinese handsets are cheap and low-quality.

For he and the OnePlus team, the OnePlus One was a gamble that, fortunately, turned out successful. “What we said was, ‘sell 30,000 phones and you keep your jobs; sell 50,000 phones and it’s a pretty good year. Sell 100,000 phones, it’s exceptional.’ But we ended up selling like, around 1.5 million smartphones,” Pei said. OnePlus intends to launch the OnePlus Two, the company’s self-branded “2016 flagship killer,” with USB Type-C charging, and 4GB of DDR4 RAM, among others.

The interview is a tear-jerker for Pei as well as the viewer, but you may find the interview to be of some worth. After all, Pei does state why the OnePlus One was an “invite-only” endeavor in the beginning, but you’ll have to hit up the source link below to find out.

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