OnePlus launches flagship 3T with eye on foreign markets

Pete Lau, founder of OnePlus, delivers a keynote speech at OnePlus 3T's China launch event held in Beijing, Nov 29, 2016. [Photo by Liu Zheng/chinadaily.com.cn]

Shenzhen-based smartphone startup OnePlus unveiled its new flagship phone - 3T - on Tuesday in Beijing.

With series of function upgrades in hardware and software, the phone originally made its debut earlier this month in London.

OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei recently spoken to social news aggregation platform Reddit that the new phones will be released on Dec 2 in India and start to ship from Dec 14.

Pete Lau, founder and CEO of OnePlus, said that Indian users have rated the OnePlus 3, the previous generation of the flagship launched in the market in June, as the best smartphone on Amazon.

The company notes the device has a rating of 4.4/5 on Amazon, the highest for any smartphone available on the platform.

OnePlus is known for its premium phones and initially sold them through invitations only.

Recently the company has launched a series of road shows to promote new products in seven European cities, including London, Paris, Lyon and Berlin, and worked with local carriers such as O2 and Elisa to sell new phones at their authorized stores in London and Helsinki.

Compared to technology giant Huawei's business expansion strategy in the market, which is to work closely with local telecom carriers to distribute its terminal devices, as a technology startup, OnePlus targets a high-end segment market with devices priced above $300.

As Chinese smartphone market gets mature and saturated with domestic brands, companies are keen on going abroad to attract users and seeking new growth engines.

Lenovo, ZTE, Xiaomi, OPPO and Vivo have stood out from the crowd and have even been ranked as one of the top 10 smartphone vendors in some of the foreign markets and regions, including India, the US, Southeast Asia and South America.