OnePlus makes some pretty good smartphones, but the company’s biggest struggle has been getting them into consumer’s hands. Sure, we’ll give it a slide for its first smartphone, the OnePlus One, but the company continued to face issues with its order system and delivering products with the OnePlus 2. And now it has the OnePlus X, which also requires an invite. OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei recently admitted that he is “self-inflicting a slower rate of growth,” but that the decision is actually a strategy.

The comment was made in an interview with International Business Times, in which Pei seems to suggest that slower growth might help the company make the right moves in a quickly changing smartphone industry. “I don’t think there will be a lot of players left in 3 to 5 years,” Pei told the news outlet, noting that he’d “be surprised” if OnePlus isn’t around in 25 years. “It is inevitable you won’t see a thousand companies in the smartphone industry several years from now.”

That’s why the company, in an effort to avoid building too many phones to match actual sales, has decided to stick with an invite system. “We might sell a lot of phones, but we might also fall flat on our faces,” Pei said, describing what would happen if OnePlus ditched the invite system. So, even though it might actually slow growth, at least OnePlus will stand a better chance against its larger foes, and will avoid a situation where it has a warehouse full of unsold phones.