Oneplus, the cult Chinese smartphone maker, has broken the billion-dollar sales barrier for the first time and made a profit, a rare feat in the ultra-competitive mobile market.

The company’s chief executive Pete Lau told The Telegraph that its revenues last year had doubled to more than $1.4bn (£1bn) and that this had come with “healthy profits”. It comes as OnePlus plans to challenge bigger players by tying up with mobile networks in the US and Europe.

The smartphone market has been flooded by competition from Chinese upstarts in recent years, making profits rare and sending established brands like HTC and Motorola into losses. While OnePlus pales to most of its rivals in size, Mr Lau said it has eked out healthy margins by focusing only on the high-end of the market. It sells most of its mobiles directly to a core of fans online, instead of through mobile networks, although it began to distribute phones through O2 in the UK in 2016.

It has not disclosed revenues since 2014, but Mr Lau said it wanted to be more transparent about revenues so that shoppers had faith in it. “If a company isn’t healthy, consumers will think twice about buying a product from them,” he said. “We want to send a signal that we’re a healthy company.”