June 2021. Pete Lau has just announced that he is taking the role of Chief Product Officer at OPPO while remaining CEO of OnePlus. The announcement confirms what the corporate structure has implied since 2020’s “closer integration” statement: OnePlus is not a competitor to OPPO. It is an OPPO brand. The organizational formality of Lau holding both titles simultaneously makes explicit a reporting relationship that has been functionally present for years. For OPPO, this is a consolidation of product decision authority under the executive most responsible for the platform’s technical direction. For OnePlus, this is the end of the fiction that a fully independent company is making fully independent decisions.

From OPPO’s perspective, the move is strategically logical. Lau’s leadership of OnePlus built the most credible challenger brand in premium Android. His engineering instincts — prioritize display quality, prioritize charging speed, minimize software bloat — have been consistent across both companies because he has been running both effectively even when only officially running one. Formalizing the CPO role at OPPO while Lau continues at OnePlus captures the benefits of that cross-brand thinking without requiring a formal merger that would trigger community backlash and regulatory attention.

What changes at OPPO under Lau’s formal CPO role

The Find X3 series, which launched in February 2021 before this announcement, is the last OPPO flagship designed without Lau’s formal CPO authority explicitly framing the product roadmap. The Find X5, which will launch in early 2022, is the first flagship where Lau is publicly acknowledged as holding product authority over both brands simultaneously. The observable difference between Find X3 and Find X5 will tell us something real about what Lau’s OPPO CPO role changes in practice versus what it formalizes that was already happening.

The MariSilicon X imaging NPU, announced in October 2021, is the product decision that most clearly reflects Lau’s engineering philosophy applied at the OPPO level: rather than relying on third-party ISPs, build in-house silicon that can be tuned to OPPO’s specific imaging quality targets. This is the same reasoning Lau applied to charging at OnePlus — own the technology rather than license it. Whether the MariSilicon X delivers on its promise depends on the software maturation that takes months after the chip ships. But the decision to build it is consistent with a product philosophy that Lau has been expressing in OPPO products since before he officially ran OPPO’s products.

What the announcement means for the OnePlus community

The OnePlus community’s response to today’s announcement is mixed in the forums and the subreddit, in a way that mirrors the broader OnePlus story. The members who have been paying attention to the corporate structure know this is a formalization rather than a change. The members who have been treating OnePlus as genuinely independent are updating their model. The members who simply want good software and fast updates are asking what this means for OxygenOS, and not getting a clear answer today. That last group is the one OPPO needs to satisfy, and the OxygenOS 12 launch in early 2022 will determine whether this organizational move was handled in a way that protected what they valued. I hope it was. Today I do not know.

Part of OPPO: The Complete Story, my full history of OPPO from DVD players to the BBK empire.