Oppo still not able to compete at the 999 Yuan price point

Lenovo has the K5 Note at 1099CNY , the K3 is at 699$ so well bellow 999. They also have solid deals for last year’s models, the K3 Note is at 699CNY now.

Lenovo has the K5 Note at 1099CNY , the K3 is at 699$ so well bellow 999. They also have solid deals for last year’s models, the K3 Note is at 699CNY now.

BBK Electronics ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBK_Electronics ) of China has a very strong marketing team that follow different strategies for their brands Vivo, Oppo & OnePlus. With OnePlus they opt for invite only online sales channel which creates a lot of hype among online customers. This brand will always have limited models, are reasonably priced, and generally available worldwide. This kind of marketing philosophy mimics that of Lenovo, LeEco & Xiaomi where you spend minimum budget on marketing expenses, bypass the middleman distributor/dealers profits, and save huge amounts of money with no investments in offline sales channel infrastructure. Thus OnePlus phones are generally available at a stellar price for its specs where the end customers are benefited the most. OnePlus may not make a huge profit per unit but instead thrives on huge volume sales. A sales target they failed to achieve with OnePlus2 as Lenovo, LeEco & Xiaomi pumped out even better models at even lower price. In India for example Lenovo Vibe X3 ate up all the market share of OnelPlus 2, so they had to immediately dropp the price by INR 2K to stay competitive.

BBK’s other two brands follow offline sales channel just like Samsung, LG, Apple & HTC. Be it Vivo or Oppo, they launch each mid-end/flagship models with big bang spending big bucks on lavish release day events & parties. They rope in some of the best celebrities of the country by paying huge cash (for marketing reasons) to grab media attention delivering front page news. Then they sponsor some of the biggest events happening in the country. Like in India, this year Vivo is the title sponsor of Indian Premier League (IPL) while Oppo is doing the same for ICC WT20. As cricket is the most happening sport in our country it only makes sense for them to invest huge amounts of money (Vivo invested roughly INR 100 crore or US $15 million in IPL) to create the country wide hype & buzz in consumer’s minds. But there is a method to all this madness.

All these titanic amounts of marketing expenditure made by Vivo or Oppo does needs to get refunded with additional profits to BBK as no one is here for charity. How to do that? One way is to make a smartphone with low-cost and subpar specs and sell it at three to four times inflated cost to garner huge profit margins, thus sucking end consumer pockets dry. But online consumers having access to internet will pretty quickly find out Xiaomi or LeEco is selling much better spec smartphones at less than half the price of a competitor Vivo/Oppo model with eqivalent product quality to boot. So Vivo and Oppo will immediately turn out to be the laughing stock of online sales and nobody will buy their unjustified high priced phones. So Oppo & Vivo opt for offline sales channel through distributors & dealers, again spending a huge amount of money to erect this huge country wide infrastructure. Like in their homeland China they mainly target Tier2 & Tieir3 cities of India where internet access is much less and end consumers have very little or no knowledge of what is happening in the mobile industry. These consumers immediately become their target prey as Vivo & Oppo trains a lot of sales reps to brainwash them. The outcome is they are able to sell their smartphones at two times the price of a similar spec phone available online, thus garnering huge profit margins and recovering all their marketing expenditure from the hard earned money of end customers.

This kind of marketing strategy is nothing unusual as it were followed by Samsung & LG five years back in India when they had to make their name. Now Samsung & LG are so popular in our country they do not have to spend big bucks in marketing like Vivo/Oppo, but still are able to sell their phones at a very high price. Unfortunately for us end consumers, even by pricing Vivo or Oppo phones in the same level of Samsung/ LG they are unable to provide the after sales service that top tier manufacturers do. Say LG & Samsung flagships will receive timely android version upgrades, where as for Vivo there are zero updates. The moral of this story is, a sane buyer should never get sucked into the hype and buzz created by smartphone makers. Better compare specs and neutral reviews from different brands before committing for a buy. For me being an online consumer, Vivo or Oppo will always be the laughing stock until they stop their unjustified high pricing strategy to loot the end customers.

Since when Oppo can sell their gadget at a cheap (read : reasonable ratio between spec and price) ?

Oppo always sell at very high price even for their very low end gadgets because somehow their fanboys keep buying their products. So why they need to reduce their price if they have enough buyers LOL ?

We are talking about supply and demand here . A lot of people (maybe mostly youngster ?) got a tendency to got affected by huge scale advertising (you know those big budget advertising with famous movie stars, expensive cars, etc etc) so they become easy pray for those premium brands.

A couple years ago i did asked my bro in law about his decision why he bought a very expensive Samsung Galaxy Note 4 that just released. His answer was” because it is cool, all my friends buying this model” haesh !!!!

Again it still doesn’t make sense to me that Oppo still can selling their overprice gadgets with other competitor like Meizu or Xiaomi that can provide better product with much cheaper price. Humans are really weird indeed.

I was recently confronted by one such Vivo fanboy, few days ago in GizChina (https://www.gizchina.com/2016/04/05/vivo-v3-v3-max-go-official/ ). First I took his comments seriously, and posted my logical views as I own two Vivo smartphones. Later after exchanging our views found the person to be an empty vessel (may be most Vivo fanboys are). And further … LOL … he self proclaimed to be the unstoppable force to reckon with and have more knowledge about Chinese phones and android than me … sigh .. a sign of pure desperation. Expecting a meaningless whiplash from him soon.

Since when Oppo can sell their gadget at a cheap (read : reasonable ratio between spec and price) ?

Oppo always sell at very high price even for their very low end gadgets because somehow their fanboys keep buying their products. So why they need to reduce their price if they have enough buyers LOL ?

We are talking about supply and demand here . A lot of people (maybe mostly youngster ?) got a tendency to got affected by huge scale advertising (you know those big budget advertising with famous movie stars, expensive cars, etc etc) so they become easy pray for those premium brands.

A couple years ago i did asked my bro in law about his decision why he bought a very expensive Samsung Galaxy Note 4 that just released. His answer was” because it is cool, all my friends buying this model” haesh !!!!

Again it still doesn’t make sense to me that Oppo still can selling their overprice gadgets with other competitor like Meizu or Xiaomi that can provide better product with much cheaper price. Humans are really weird indeed.

thats why i never bother to buy oppo or vivo. they gave shitty specs with high prices. and thier quality is as good as xiaomi, meizu etc. i feel like oppo and vivo are taking alot from the consumers..