OPPO: This year's focus is not on new outlets.

Every year when you return to your hometown, you will find that the mobile phone brand OPPO store has penetrated into the second and third tiers, and even the fourth tier cities.

In fact, the OPPO line currently has nearly 200,000 sales outlets. Unlike online shopping, this face-to-face offline sales is still the main channel for most consumers to buy mobile phones. In 2015, OPPO achieved sales of 50 million units, compared with 30 million units in the previous year, with a growth rate of 67%, which is inconsistent with the single-digit growth of the domestic mobile phone market.

A number of industry insiders said in an interview with the "First Financial Daily" reporter that the OPPO scores have benefited from years of offline channel layout and branding. After the overwhelming TV commercials and variety shows, young consumers' awareness of the brand has risen to a certain height, and the endorsements of the stars Lu Yi and Li Yifeng have also narrowed the distance with young people.

Against the background of the global and the overall slowdown of the Chinese mobile phone market, the stifling between domestic mobile phones has become increasingly fierce. For OPPO, the long-term layout of offline channels has certainly achieved the current advantages, but it is also facing other vendors to accelerate the offline channel layout challenges.

In this regard, Wu Qian, vice president of OPPO's market and channel, said that the focus of OPPO's channel construction in 2016 is to optimize the quality of existing outlets rather than increase the scale.

In 2015, a number of mobile phone brands have indicated that they will increase their investment in offline channels. In this regard, Wu Qiang said that in the short term, OPPO will increase the cost of offline channels, but it is not worried about the pressure in the long run. "The offline channels really need to be done well and require long-term cultivation and precipitation."

For the outside world, OPPO's channel construction has always been mysterious. Wu Qiang said that the biggest feature of the OPPO offline channel is to allow agents and OPPO to maintain a unified cultural values. In fact, OPPO divides the country into more than 30 first-level agent areas, and agents are responsible for retailing goods to terminals.

OPPO's channel history is very long. As early as when step by step to do VCD, all localities have to send representatives of manufacturers, some employees have become the first batch of BBK dealers, and later OPPO was established, and some of these people became OPPO dealers. . Although the channel has changed several times, the tradition of OPPO is that the relationship between dealers and manufacturers is very close. Some OPPO agents are former OPPO employees, and some agents also hold shares in OPPO.

This close relationship determines that dealers will not do something outrageous and thus damage OPPO's reputation, and the advantages of after-sales and service will also help shape the brand.

The reporter learned that OPPO achieved a 67% increase in sales last year. Compared with the increase in offline investment, OPPO had nearly 140,000 sales outlets at the end of 2014, and this number has surged to 200,000 by the end of 2015.

"There must be a bearer behind the mission objectives. It only has a limited effect on the sales of the original outlets, and it is relatively easy to increase sales by new outlets." In an interview with the reporter of China Business News, Wu Qiang did not deny the effect of outlet expansion on sales growth. However, he does not think that this is a response to other companies' increased investment in offline channels. "We are developing according to our own plans."

OPPO founder and CEO Chen Mingyong once used Go to metaphor to operate. "The real Go master is you around your site. I am around my site. We may not have any killings. We have seen it." In fact, OPPO I am used to doing everything myself, regardless of product design concept, channel marketing, it is still one of the few domestic mobile phone manufacturers that still keep their own manufacturing plants.

Consulting firm GFK believes that the OPPO and VIVO traditional models have developed to a "peak" and continue to break through the need for further "quality change." In fact, OPPO's current challenges include how to digest the rapidly growing sales outlets in the expansion.

According to the GFK report, in 2015, the growth of China's smartphone market was almost stagnant. Different research institutions have certain differences in the domestic mobile phone market growth data, but overall maintain a common judgment, the domestic market is gradually saturated, and the growth slowdown will continue.


"When the capacity of the plate no longer increases, competition and shuffling will be more intense." A person in charge of a mobile phone company told this reporter.

In 2015, Xiaomi still occupied the second place in the domestic mobile phone brand market share, but the growth rate slowed down, while the Cooler, Lenovo, which has a relatively high carrier channel, also experienced a decline in performance. The offline channels accounted for a relatively high OPPO, VIVO, the growth rate in 2015 is obvious, rushing into the top four domestic mobile phones in the domestic market.

Before 2014, online channel sales accounted for a small percentage of overall mobile phone sales, but maintained a strong annual growth of 50%. GFK report pointed out that after 2014, the growth of mobile Internet sales has been strong. It is maintained at around 85 million units and is expected to change little in 2016.

Carrier channels were once one of the mainstream channels for mobile phone sales. However, the adjustment of the subsidy policy has led to a decline in the performance of mobile phone manufacturers such as Coolpad and Lenovo, which originally relied on operators. In the first half of 2015, Coolpad’s revenue declined significantly, and it was necessary to split and reorganize its business based on different channels.

"We judge that the entire e-commerce market will maintain a relatively stable trend in 2016," Wu Qiang said. "From our understanding of the channel, the future is more integrated online and offline. We call this the omnichannel concept.