OnePlus 6 becomes Chinese smartphone maker’s fastest-ever seller as people turn on to design

The latest 6-series flagship model from five-year-old smartphone maker OnePlus has become its most popular phone ever, selling more than 1 million units globally in the three weeks since it hit shelves last month.

OnePlus 6 has become the company’s fastest-selling smartphone after crossing the 1 million benchmark in 22 days, comfortably beating earlier OnePlus 5 and OnePlus 5T models, which both achieved sales of a million units about three months after launch, the Shenzhen-based company said in a press release on Friday.

OnePlus attributed the success to its ‘one flagship a year’ strategy, which involves concentrating on one big launch as opposed to several smaller ones, allowing the company to “create a superior product with a premium user-experience” each year, said the release.

The Chinese brand, whose overseas sales are more than double those in its domestic market, is seeking to gain recognition among Silicon Valley “techies” for producing “one of the best phones available in the market,” said OnePlus founder Pete Lau in an interview with the South China Morning Post last month.

Established in 2013, OnePlus has developed ambitious global marketing campaigns. At a two-day pop-up event hosted by the company on May 21 and 22, just one week after the new phone’s global launch in London, Beijing and Mumbai, more than 15,000 would-be buyers lined up outside shops in 26 cities and 11 countries, in scenes reminiscent of Apple iPhone launches.