OnePlus to invest Rs 1000 Cr in Hyd R&D facility in 3 years

Chinese premium smartphone OnePlus would be investing Rs 1,000 crore in its first Research and Development facility which was inaugurated here on Monday, in the next three years, Founder and CEO of OnePlus Pete Lau said.

The company plans to grow the Hyderabad facility into its biggest R&D centre globally in three years by employing 1,500 people in the next three years.

The facility currently has over 200 employees, he said.

"In three years, we plan to grow the new R&D centre in Hyderabad into our biggest globally. We plan to re-focus our R&D efforts on a large scale and drive innovations in India for the global product, especially on the software side with special emphasis on Artificial Intelligence, 5G and IoT," Lau said.

The OnePlus R&D centre will house three labs - camera lab, communications and networking labs and automation labs that will focus heavily on camera development, 5G testing, software with a focus on AI and performance, a press release said.

Spread in 1.86 lakh sft, the facility, located at Vamsiram's IT Park was inaugurated by former State Minister K T Rama Rao and Jayesh Ranjan, Principal Secretary for IT and Industries.

Rama Rao asked the mobile maker to look into the possibility of setting up a plant in the State.

However, Lau was non-committal on the issue.

OnePlus sales in India was largely driven by Amazon's online market place and the company is now planing to enhance its off-line footprints across major cities, OnePlus India general manager Vikas Agarwal said.

According to him, the smartphone maker get 70 per cent sales from global markets and 50 per cent of it comes from India.

Agarwal said the company will start exporting its 'made in India' phone to other countries.

"By the end of next year we are planning to set up offline stores in 50 cities. We will also be partnering with offline partners and have presence in the top 500 cities.

We already have more than 1500 stores in top 100 cities through our partners," he said.

OnePlus is coming up with 16,000 square-foot 'super-experience' store in Hyderabad and similar ones will come up in all the major cities in the next two to three years, he added.