As domestic mobile phones enter the knockout stage, OPPO's moves have always been the focus of attention in the industry.

In addition to participating in the annual "ranking competition" for new phones in the first half of the year, the Reno14 series will be released soon. A rumor about the "Find X8 series being complained by hundreds of people for treat differently between new and old models, ignoring the rights and interests of users of old flagship models" has spread online. According to relevant media descriptions, "Before August, the OPPO Find X8 Ultra was only a "half-finished phone" in terms of imaging."

Just as the new phone is about to enter the battlefield, it is criticized by consumers. OPPO is not in a good position.

In fact, this is just a microcosm of OPPO's embarrassing situation. The bigger problem is that as a mainstream manufacturer, OPPO has lost some of its domestic base. IDC data shows that OPPO's market share has fallen from first place in China in the first quarter of 2023 to third place in the same period in 2025. In 2024, it fell to fourth place with a negative annual growth rate of 6.4%, in stark contrast to vivo's annual growth rate of 10.3%.

The strong return of Huawei is an objective factor that cannot be avoided, but OPPO's predicament is more three-dimensional, with trade-offs in product management and strategic choices behind it.

When it comes to this point, I believe most people are impressed with Song Ziwei, who was responsible for the product line at vivo. However, what is less known to the outside world is that in the telecommunications industry, the product and market direction of a mobile phone manufacturer is not only influenced by product managers, but also by a more crucial role, the GTM.

GTM stands for go to market. It is commonly understood as the planning and management of a product's entire life cycle after entering the market, as well as taking responsibility for the commercial success of production, supply, and sales. Every new mobile phone is closely related to it, from market insight and product definition to market launch, integrated marketing, and channel retail, and it can even influence the entire brand's strategy.

From the perspective of GMT, it is not difficult to find that OPPO is at a crossroads.

01

Products, walking on three legs

In the golden age of smartphone growth, multi-product line operations were considered a convention for seizing domestic market segments. In this regard, Huawei's launch of Honor and Xiaomi's focus on Redmi are typical examples. In contrast, OPPO chose to walk on "three legs" in its brand product line.

Specifically, OPPO initially divided its mobile phone products into three categories: OPPO, One Plus, and realme. In terms of the number of sub-brands alone, OPPO has the most product lines among mainstream domestic mobile phone manufacturers, compared to Xiaomi and vivo, which both have 2 (excluding foreign markets), while Huawei and Honor have developed independently.

However, as the mobile phone market has become increasingly saturated in recent years, OPPO, which still adheres to this route, has not tasted the sweetness of 1+1+1>3 that it brings. The left-right game between sub-brands has gradually blurred the original strategy. The most typical example is realme. Frankly speaking, realme focuses on the mid-to-low-end market, but in terms of GTM product definition, there is no effective differentiation between sibling brands. For example, Redmi's K series and Turbo series, as well as OnePlus's ACE series and ACE V series, have no fundamental differences in configuration and price segments.

realme's market performance also validates this point. Taking the third quarter of 2022 as an example, realme's share of the domestic market was only 2.5%, a decrease of 43.1% compared to the same period in 2021. Even if calculated by activations, realme's market share fell to 1.2% in Q1 of last year (2024).

As for OnePlus, President Li Jie vowed last year to surpass Xiaomi. According to industry professionals' calculations, its share is likely to remain around 2% in 2023. In the view of industry insiders in the telecommunications industry, "It is already quite difficult to concentrate resources on creating a hit product, but if you want to simultaneously manage three major product lines, the research and development investment and sales strategy behind them are likely to be dispersed and homogenized."

Therefore, reorganizing the brand line and redefining the relationships between each sub-product line is almost a common practice among all large enterprises. Taking the new energy vehicle industry as an example, Geely recently incorporated ZEEKR into its group, which is seen by the outside world as a reintegration of ZEEKR after experiencing losses. Similarly, NIO also announced the integration of its major brands recently to adapt to market competition.

In other words, how OPPO will reorganize and balance the relationships between its major sub-brands in the future is the first problem that lies on the surface.

Returning to the company level, OPPO mobile phones are divided into three different product positions: Find (focusing on high-end), Reno series (focusing on mid-range), and A series (covering low-end).

In the mid-to-low-end market, there are approximately 1 billion smartphone users in China, half of whom are mid-range price users. OPPO's current situation is that in the face of brand offensives from Redmi, iQOO, Honor, etc., Reno's once-proud "lightweight design" advantage has gradually become an industry standard.

Even without comparing with Huawei, taking Honor as an example, the brand has pushed the "drop-resistant" selling point to the extreme. The X50 series has cumulatively sold over 15 million units, ranking first among Android phones in the same segment and was once the king of the year; in April of this year, Honor launched the industry's first 8000mAh large battery, which is also a new "selling point" in the market.

Objectively speaking, OPPO has also stood out with its VOOC flash charging technology, and even OPPO's mobile phone market share was ahead of Honor's. However, in terms of creating differentiated functions for the mid-to-low-end market, OPPO still has room for improvement, at least in terms of selling points that consumers frequently discuss, such as communication capabilities and battery life.

The "sea of phones" tactic was once considered an effective way to saturate the market. However, as Huawei returned with the nova series and Enjoy series, it pushed competition to a new height. In addition, many manufacturers are trying to transfer flagship technologies, sinking algorithms, drop resistance, screens, and other technologies originally found in high-end phones into the 1-4k price range. It will not be easy for OPPO to stand out from a myriad of products.

Similarly, in the more important high-end market, although OPPO has not given up, the road has been difficult.

Since the launch of the OPPO Find series, OPPO has been "entrepreneurial" in its pursuit of high-end positioning. The initial strong sales of the Find X7 and X8 series are indisputable facts, but to establish a foothold in the high-end market, two key elements are indispensable: core original technology and the resulting consumer brand perception.

Huawei's success supports this point. In the past, Apple was once considered an unchallengeable high-end gap for domestic mobile phones. The Mate7 series used domestic strength to open the chapter of Huawei's high-end surge. In the following years, HarmonyOS ecosystem, Kirin chips, global satellite communication, Kunlun glass... Technologies with obvious differentiation flooded in.

According to Counterpoint Research data, in 2024, Apple, Huawei, and Xiaomi took the top three spots in China's high-end mobile phone market share. For now, if mid-to-low-end phones are OPPO's base, and high-end positioning has to be pursued, how to break through the siege is the second problem OPPO needs to consider.

02

Channels, two major challenges

Considering that nearly 60% of China's smartphone market share occurs offline and that it is necessary to rely on channel retailers to enhance consumer stickiness, by convention, each manufacturer will expend a lot of energy on offline resource investment and layout.

Unlike Huawei, Honor, and others, which set up terminal representatives in various provinces, OPPO does not directly manage channel distribution customers, but instead operates through platform agents in different regions, such as Daxin Group. The advantage of this approach is that it can help OPPO quickly complete product distribution and business sinking in the market. However, as times change, the once channel advantage has precisely become OPPO's weakness now.

"Huawei and OV, Honor, and other manufacturers have highly overlapping channel retailers. When Huawei had not yet returned, the top dealers could still share the pie in terms of shipments. Now, some key customers have defected, which can be seen from changes in shipments," a mobile phone industry insider told Xinmou.

Taking some areas in Zhejiang Province as an example, even if OPPO ties its task volume to the interests of couple stores, promotion social security, rebates, etc., with monthly targets ranging from a dozen to several dozen units, under the circumstances of multi-brand competition and insufficient foot traffic, the number of mobile phones that small stores can sell each month often has an upper limit, and some stores even have a laid-back mindset. Occasionally, some brand sales teams, in order to complete their performance, collaborate with customers to dump large quantities of goods into the communication market.

The lack of a high-end brand experience is another shortcoming of OPPO's retail capabilities.

Although OPPO claimed to open at least 2,000 experience stores last year, compared to players like Huawei, which has intensified the construction of direct-sales stores and authorized experience stores in the past few years. We still take Zhejiang Province as an example. By flipping through the map, you can clearly compare the data. Huawei has 300 to 400 authorized experience stores (exclusive stores), while OPPO brand exclusive stores are slightly insufficient in scale.

According to Liu Bo, President of OPPO China, OPPO is transforming its offline channels into "user-centric" through this transformation. However, compared to its competitors, it is still slightly inferior in speed. Furthermore, once good locations are occupied by other manufacturers, the advantages of subsequent brands wanting to enter will be greatly reduced. This can be seen from the image pages of experience stores randomly displayed on the map.

03

Strategy, one ambition

Whether it is product creation or retail construction, ultimately it comes down to OPPO's strategic issues.

This tests the determination of helmsman Chen Mingyong. Compared to other manufacturers, OPPO's corporate culture is more about having an ordinary mindset, which Chen Mingyong has emphasized many times in the past. But the problem is that as the consumer replacement cycle lengthens, top competitors come on strong, the market share that OPPO holds fast to declines, it is difficult for high-end products to break through, and there is intense competition in the mid-to-low-end price range... In this context, a protracted war is undoubtedly what OPPO will face.

There is a clear viewpoint in "On Protracted War" that winning a war must go through three stages: "strategic defense, strategic stalemate, and strategic counteroffensive," as well as the inevitable law of "final victory." Obviously, OPPO's state in the Chinese market is precisely at the stage of strategic stalemate to strategic counteroffensive.

At this stage, OPPO has many choices, and whether it can raise the banner of independent research and development is an unavoidable topic.

There are clues that in the past few years, OPPO has abandoned attempts to try its own chips and has also suspended the progress of its Hangzhou Global R&D Headquarters project. Under the new trend of AI mobile phones, in addition to breaking through established flagship technologies and enhancing retail capabilities, the more crucial thing for OPPO is to consider how to take the lead in the AI era?

Taking the Find X8 series as an example, the AI one-click flash note function behind it can automatically capture screen content (such as guides, articles) and store them in "Xiaobu Memory," which is OPPO's positive exploration in the field of AI. However, an in-depth analysis reveals that most current AI mobile phones deploy large models on the client side and embed intelligent agents, and every manufacturer is exerting efforts. As for how to balance computing power, models, chips, and scenarios, and whether it can bring users a phenomenal product as stunning as the iPhone 4, it is still a difficult problem.

In the view of industry insiders, Chen Mingyong, who was born out of BBK and learned from Duan Yongping, has inscribed "duty" into the core of OPPO. However, when the mobile phone market falls into saturated competition and supply chain efficiency reaches nearly its peak, how to take the next step is a difficult problem that Chen Mingyong urgently needs to consider.

Interestingly, when Lei Jun stated that "domestic mobile phones are entering the final knockout stage, and it is impossible for all of them to survive in the long run" in the market's anxious situation, Liu Bo, President of OPPO China, recently resigned due to participating in an executive learning program. Liu Bo himself said, "The company has arranged a learning program, which cannot be considered a rest. Learning will be more mentally demanding."

After in-depth study, whether OPPO can restart will be answered by the market.