From DailyTech: OnePlus may not be a name known to a mainstream audience, but tech enthusiasts should be familiar with the company by now. The company has been selling its “One” smartphone for the past six months via an invite-only system (which has sparked the ire of many people) at a bargain price of $349 (for the 64GB model).
OnePlus’ co-founder, Carl Pei, recently sat down to talk with Forbes and gave an update on the company and where it goes from here. According to Pei, the company’s strict rationing of its smartphones has led to sales of 500,000 units since the One was initially made available.
OnePlus has embraced the invite-only strategy, because it doesn’t want to be in Amazon’s situation where it is sitting on $83 million in unsold inventory. Instead, the company employs a just in time (JIT) strategy to slowly build its user base.
“Normally when you launch a [smartphone] product it gets really hot in the first month, and in the second or third month, sales start to drop really fast,” said Pei. “For OnePlus, when you look at our internal metrics, our sales just keep growing.”
The company has taken steps to move past its invite-only system, offering up a brief pre-order window on October 27 (over 10,000 people were able to secure an order despite issues with the OnePlus’ website). The company is also looking to offer a second round of pre-orders on November 17 for those that missed out the first time around.
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