Home > Industry > Oppo Get Knickers In A Twist Over Realme Only Want ‘Positive PR’

Oppo Get Knickers In A Twist Over Realme Only Want ‘Positive PR’

Chinese phone brand Oppo who are trying to enter the cheap end of the Australian smartphone market with Realme a 100% Oppo owned brand have apparently told their PR agency, that they are only interested in “positive” stories about the new brand and as a result banned ChannelNews from last night’s launch of the brand in Australia.

Their ban came after we questioned their claim that they are “The fastest growing smartphone brand in the world”.

Oppo who are well known for trying to manipulate their PR coverage don’t like being called out as we have done in the past, they try to buy journalists with free phones, trips and expensive entertainment and parties, a practice that is common with Chinese brands such as Oppo and Huawei.

4Square Media who have the consumer electronics and appliance market for several decades are not a media organisation that kisses the backside of vendors to get advertising or when we do get a free phone only write a “positive” review which Oppo expects in Australia.

We have been highly critical of Samsung and LG devices as well as other brands who actually so spend marketing dollars with 4Square Media.

In the past we have challenged Oppo claims that they were the #3 smartphone brand in Australia.

When leading research Company IDC had archrival TCL Mobile clearly at #3 in Australia with their Alcatel brand Oppo were claiming that they were the $3 brand despite achieving less than half the sales that TCL Mobile achieved with their Alcatel brand.

At the time Sam Skontos the CEO of TCL Mobile in Australia challenged Oppo management in Australia to open up their books to a third party to quantify their claims.

He even offered to do the same with TCL Mobile records.

Oppo refused to take up the offer because there was the real risk that their actual sales claims would be exposed.

Late last week we asked three research Companies including IDC, Gartner who are the two main research Companies who collect data on Australian and global smartphone sales as well as Counterpoint to comment on claims made by Realme management that what they were about to launch in Australia was the worlds “fastest-growing smartphone brand in the world”.

Both Gartner and IDC came back indicating they had no record of Realme global sales.

This is a company that only launched in Europe a few months ago. In the USA, Australia and several other key European Countries retailers and carriers are not selling the Realme product which is a rebadged Oppo smartphone.

5 days after we asked PR Company Thrive to quantify the claimed growth for Realme the Company delivered a link to information from Counterpoint an overseas research Company who most carriers and smartphone brands in Australia don’t supply information to.

Their research shows that between Q2 2018 and Q2 2019 Realme was actually listed on global shipment data. It showed that the Chinese Company grew share from 1.1% to 1.3% which represents 2% growth.

During the same period, Samsung grew its share from 19.6% to 21.3% on significantly larger volumes.

When it came to millions of units shipped Realme went from 0.5% to 4.7% share while Samsung went from 71.5% to 76.6% on a total market volume in Q2 2019 of 360 million units which were down from 364.3M units in Q2 2018.



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