The seemingly unstoppable Xiaomi just had a pretty rough year, having failed to achieve even the lowest sales goal that it set for itself, thanks to intense competition from Apple and its fellow Chinese smartphone makers. Huawei and Lenovo were especially aggressive last year, but there’s another company that always manages to get overlooked, even though it managed to sell more than 50 million smartphones last year. That company is called Oppo, and its smartphones sales have been exploding over the past couple of years, to the point where it’s close to surpassing LG to become the world’s sixth-largest smartphone maker. Once it does that, it’ll be on its way to surpassing Xiaomi and Lenovo to secure the fifth and fourth spots in the smartphone market, respectively.
Xiaomi, China’s most talked about phone brand, is going through a rough patch. After a rocket-ship ride since its first smartphone came out in 2011, the past year saw the giant startup miss its sales target and then fall short on another important metric as well. Although it’s still in the top five global smartphone makers, growth slowed dramatically as Xiaomi’s overseas expansion stalled and rival brands – particularly Chinese giants like Huawei and Lenovo – fought harder for China’s massive market for budget phones. But not every young Chinese brand had such a bad time in 2015. One that you might have forgotten – or never even heard of – had a stellar year. Oppo. It sold 50 million phones last year, the company states, which is a lot more than the approximate 30 million it got rid of the year prior. That puts Oppo just behind Korea’s LG, which sold 59.7 million smartphones in 2015. LG is the world’s sixth biggest smartphone brand, IDC said yesterday. But whereas LG’s numbers stagnated, Oppo boomed, seeing 67 percent year-on-year growth. Oppo – which came out with its first phone in 2008 – has done this by pushing into new markets a lot faster than Xiaomi with its budget and mid-range smartphones. First it went after fast-growing developing nations like Thailand, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Vietnam. Then it launched in India at the start of 2014, getting in ahead of Xiaomi. More recently it tackled tougher markets, including a launch in Australia.
