Love it or hate it but you cannot ignore the OnePlus One. While the company has received a lot of criticism for some of its move, its handset — the One — has been widely acclaimed by reviewers and users alike. Speaking to a Forbes reporter at Dublin’s Web Summit, Director and co-founder of OnePlus Carl Pei revealed that the company has managed to ship half a million units of the One. Considering that the OnePlus One has only been available via an invite until late last month, this is a pretty significant achievement for the year old company. The company is now pushing to reaching the 1 million mark before the end of this year, though Pei exclaimed that “it’s going to be hard.” Carl also stated that the company has so far only spent $300 on advertising, which “was spent experimenting on different types of Facebook ads.” The company’s main source of marketing has been its users and their word of mouth publicity. “Normally when you launch a [smartphone] product it gets really hot in the first month, and in the second or third month, sales start to drop really fast. For OnePlus, when you look at our internal metrics, our sales just keep growing.” He also revealed that the company is making a single-figure dollar profit on every unit of One sold. However, the company intends on making money down the line by releasing “lifestyle products or specialised accessories.” Down the line, the company expects to create its own software and services for monetisation by leveraging its user base. It was only last month that OnePlus started taking pre-orders for the One, even though the pre-order window was open only for an hour. The handset is slated to go on pre-order again on November 17th.
