Andrew Williams

2019 could be the year that the world’s biggest smartphone maker is not Samsung, not Apple, but a Chinese company named BBK Electronics. In November, CCS Insight predicted that “if current trends hold, BBK could become the global leader in smartphone shipments within several quarters.” If and when that happens, it won’t be as symbolic as, say, China’s Chang’e space program growing tomato and potato seeds on the far side of the Moon, but it’ll certainly be something.

For those who aren't familiar with BBK, chances are you’ve heard of its smartphone brand OnePlus. According to Counterpoint Research, OnePlus was in third place for “premium Android” smartphone sales in Europe for 2018, but, more importantly, its OnePlus 6T is one of our top-rated smartphones you can buy, full stop.


“The Chinese smartphone vendors are no longer offering ‘me too’ products, they are actually aggressively driving some technology innovations and can be trendsetters from photography and camera features to display design,” says Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner.

Following close behind, at least as far as the UK and Europe are concerned, are the rest of the BBK cohort, namely Oppo, Vivo and Realme alongside rival brands such as Meizu. As sales of smartphones are slowing in China, the expansion of budget and mid-range smartphone brands into countries such as India and Nigeria makes a lot of sense.

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The strategy is to sell millions and millions of smartphones, at low-profit margins, while building out services and software that can actually make money. “Their challenge is how to create value around their brands and how to become ecosystem owners beyond just hardware,” says Cozza.


That’s where headline-grabbing smartphone prototypes, specs, and features, as per OnePlus, come into the equation. It’s not enough for these companies to shift mid-range phones around the world. They need to show that they have the brands and services that can compete with Apple and Samsung regardless of whether BBK Electronics, which was founded way back in 1995 and also makes TVs, cameras and smartwatches, gets to the No.1 spot for sales.

Expect a lot of smartphone hype, and some genuine innovation, from these Chinese smartphone makers over the next 12 months.

Oppo

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BBK Electronics’ Oppo is huge. To give you a sense of how huge, it accounted for 10 per cent of all ‘premium’ smartphone sales in Q2 of 2018, more than Huawei, Xiaomi and, yes, OnePlus.


Oppo is holding an official UK launch in London on January 29, a signal that it’s looking to repeat the success of OnePlus here. The real news, though, will probably wait until Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which starts on February 24.

Talking smartphone tech at an event in Beijing in early January, Oppo announced that it’s developing a smartphone camera with a 10x optical zoom, which it will demo at MWC. And, in December, its CEO Tony Chen committed to spending a whopping $1.43 billion on R&D in 2019, a 150 per cent year-on-year increase with 2018.

Oppo has a multi-year deal licensing Nokia patents - as do Huawei and Xiaomi - and it also announced it has a 5G Find X prototype, with an X50 5G modem and an engineering sample Snapdragon 855 chip inside, to kick off 2019. In other words, Oppo is looking to move beyond years of criticism that it copies Apple’s iPhones and keep up with the Huawei’s when it comes to smartphone innovation.

Meizu

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Founded by Jack Wong in Zhuhai, China, in 2003, Meizu originally made MP3 and then MP4 players before switching to smartphones in 2008. It operates on a smaller scale than the BBK brands on this list - its website boasts that Meizu has “more than 1,000 employees”. It’s also not in the top five phone players in China - Huawei, Xiaomi, Apple, Vivo and Oppo - sneaking into sixth place for online retailer JD.com’s New Year’s Day smartphone sales in January.

That doesn’t mean it's not getting plenty of attention, though. Its latest (pretty effective) stunt is the Meizu Zero. Yes, the “world’s first holeless phone” has no charging port, no speaker holes, no SIM card slot and no buttons. It does have a ceramic build; a couple of cameras on the back; a 5.99-inch notchless, Super AMOLED display; an underglass fingerprint sensor, 18W fast charging and haptic virtual buttons. There’s no price or release date confirmed.

Meizu has been selling in Europe for almost a year, and, more widely, its global sales are more positive than its sales in China recently. In April 2018, it struck a deal with distributor WayteQ Europe with the Meizu M6 and M6 Note landing first in Hungary. Meizu’s website will direct you to a map of Beijing if you hit the ‘where to buy’ tab, though its phones are easily available via Amazon UK.

Poco

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Not in fact a fresh-faced Chinese contender, Poco is a sub-brand of Xiaomi that was initially geared towards the India market but has since expanded in various directions. Poco phones - or Pocophones as they’re known - run Xiaomi software, and in the launch keynote execs specifically namechecked OnePlus as the king they were going after.

At the end of 2018, Xiaomi VP Manu Kumair Jain tweeted that its hero product, the Pocophone F1, had sold 700,000 units globally, including its most important market of India and South Korea, where it was released in mid-November, between launching in August and the beginning of December. The Poco F1 did actually launch in Europe in August but with a more mid-range price tag of £329/€399, as compared to the much cheaper price equivalent to €260 in India.

Its big sell has been the fact it’s powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 processor, but Xiaomi has been accused of cutting corners elsewhere, in areas you might take for granted. For instance, multiple reviewers have questioned whether the Poco F1 has an oleophobic coating on the screen - Xiaomi says it does - as the smartphone tends to pick up smudges.

Xiaomi’s chairman and CEO Lei Jun announced in April 2018 that it is committed to making no more than 5 per cent profit margins on hardware. Future revenue is more likely to come from MIUI services such as streaming, selling fonts and themes and - the contentious one - advertising. Some users have complained at the frequency of ads which appear on apps like the MIUI music app and even settings menus. Note: this only applies to MIUI devices and not Android One phones such as the excellent Xiaomi Mi A2 Lite.

Realme

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The latest smartphone name from the BBK Electronics stable, “youth-centric” Realme is run by Sky Li Bingzhong, formerly a VP of international mobile business at you guessed it... Oppo. Originally a subsidiary named Oppo Real, which was launched back in 2010, Realme is following the Huawei/Honor model with more anglicised branding. It launched in India in May 2018 with a focus on budget phones before it was officially spun out of BBK as a standalone company in July.

Realme is already a hit in India and Indonesia. On Jan 2 this year, Realme announced on Twitter that it had sold four million handsets globally in seven months and it was third after Xiaomi and Samsung for total smartphone sales during India’s Diwali Festive Season sales in October and November. It also topped the charts on Lazada’s Singles Day in Indonesia (not to be confused with the much bigger Singles Day in China) last November, beating Samsung and Xiaomi.

As for its ongoing relationship with Oppo, it shares smartphone production with Oppo but has its own R&D operations. Realme also doesn’t seem to have a fully formed business strategy in place yet. At first, it billed itself as an “online exclusive” smartphone maker, partnering with Amazon and Flipkart in India, but at the end of December, Madhav Shah, CEO of Realme India, announced plans to sell its phones in 20,000 stores and outlets across 150 cities in India by the end of 2019. There are also plans to expand to southeast Asia and eastern Europe. The official Realme hashtag? #ProudToBeYoung.

Vivo

The last BBK Electronics company on this list, and one of the biggest smartphone sellers in China, is Vivo. Like Oppo and Xiaomi, Counterpoint Research estimates that around 95 per cent of Vivo’s sales in 2018 were in mainland China, but it’s another example of a BBK smartphone brand that’s developing novel, if not groundbreaking, technologies and designs as well as being known for its selfie cameras.

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Its 2018 Vivo NEX smartphone, for instance, has an in-display fingerprint sensor, pop-up ‘elevating’ forward-facing camera and what it refers to as an Ultra Full View Display with a 19.3:9 ratio. Punch holes and notches, eat your heart out.

After announcing its intentions to sell its phones in Europe and Africa, with a focus on Russia, Kenya and Morocco, Vivo signed a $4 billion deal with Qualcomm at the end of 2017. The Vivo NEX launched first in China, then internationally later in 2018, and is now available to buy online in the UK. We may not have seen bigger Vivo fanfare in Europe on account of BBK’s plans for Oppo.

Infinix, Tecno and Itel

Shenzhen-based Transsion Holdings overtook Samsung as the biggest smartphone company in terms of sales in Africa in 2017, and it also sold the most feature phones on the continent that year. Now, Transsion doesn’t officially sell in the US or Europe yet but its phone brands are well known in the rest of the world.

Infinix, a subsidiary launched in 2013, is based in Hong Kong with R&D and production in China and design teams in France. It sells in 30 countries, mainly in the Middle East and Africa, including Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, India, Mexico and Bangladesh.

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Infinix is unlikely to be selling its Note 4 and Note 5 phablets officially in Europe anytime soon, for obvious reasons, but it also has Zero, Hot, Surf and Quiet smartphone lines. Infinix Quiet X and Quiet 2 headphones have also shown up on Gearbest, shipping to the UK.

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Another Transsion Holdings brand, Tecno Mobile is headquartered in Hong Kong and it sells in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Instead of flashy design quirks, its CEO and founder George Zho has focused R&D on devices which offer a long battery life to appeal to people with poor access to electricity or living in areas with blackouts, cameras calibrated to darker skin tones and language support for Swahili and Amharic.

The Tecno L9 Plus, for instance, has a 5,000mAh battery and the company claims that’s good for 25 hours of talk time or 72 hours of 'heavy use'.

The most popular phone brand in Africa in 2017 was yet another Transsion brand, Itel which has self-explanatory Selfie, Max Power and Basic series smartphones.

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