OnePlus Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd. is officially registered today, December 16, 2013. The founding team is six people. The co-founders are Pete Lau, formerly a vice president at OPPO where he was instrumental in the OPPO N1’s CyanogenMod partnership, and Carl Pei, a 23-year-old Swedish-Chinese tech enthusiast who has been running a popular Meizu fan site before being hired first by Meizu and then by OPPO. Neither of them has ever built a smartphone company before. They are doing it anyway.

The conversation that created this company happened in August 2013 over coffee in Shenzhen. Lau looked around the table at his colleagues and noticed something that bothered him: everyone was using an iPhone. Not because they did not know about Android. Because at that price point, in 2013, Android cannot match what Apple is doing. That gap, Lau decided, is both a market opportunity and a design challenge. He left OPPO in November. Now, five weeks later, the company exists.

What they are actually trying to build

The stated goal is a phone that makes the table full of iPhone users reach for an Android device instead. Not by matching the iPhone on brand cachet, which is impossible for a startup in 2013. By making an Android phone so technically superior at its price point that the choice becomes obvious. “Never Settle” is the philosophy before it is the slogan. It means: do not accept the compromise that every other Android manufacturer has decided is good enough.

This requires something unusual for a hardware company: willingness to sell at thin or zero margins on the premise that community growth is more valuable than per-unit profit. The business logic requires scale to work, which means the brand needs to grow fast enough that eventual margin expansion justifies the early losses. Whether that logic holds will determine whether OnePlus is a company in five years or a footnote.

The OPPO connection from the start

Here is the part that the company is not discussing openly today. According to public Chinese corporate records, OnePlus’s only institutional shareholder is OPPO Electronics. Not OPPO Mobile, Lau has been careful to distinguish. OPPO Electronics. Both companies confirm that OnePlus is using OPPO’s manufacturing lines and sharing supply chain resources. The box OnePlus devices will ship in is expected to say: “Designed by OnePlus. Manufactured by OPPO.”

BBK Electronics, the Dongguan conglomerate that owns OPPO and Vivo, is therefore present in OnePlus from day one. The community that will rally behind OnePlus as an insurgent challenger to the established brands deserves to know exactly how independent that challenger is. For now, the answer is: more structurally dependent on OPPO than the independence narrative suggests. Whether that dependency creates problems or stays manageable will depend entirely on whether OnePlus’s interests and OPPO’s interests continue to align. Today, they do. The question is whether they always will.

The company has a name, a philosophy, a founding team, and OPPO’s factory floor. The phone is coming in 2014.

Part of OnePlus: The Complete Story, my full history of OnePlus from founding to the Realme merger.