The history of BBK Electronics: how the brands Oppo, Vivo, Realme and OnePlus conquered the world of smartphones
Posted: Thu Dec 12, 2024 10:00 am
Realme, OnePlus, Vivo, and OPPO are all popular brands, but few people know that they are all run by one company called BBK Electronics. Today, we’ll tell you how the Chinese manufacturer has managed to capture its share of the global smartphone market by experimenting and testing different approaches.
DVD players and the first attempts to enter the telephone market
In 1995, a young Chinese businessman, Duan Yongping, who had experience working in a factory and in the video game industry, founded a DVD player company, BBK Electronics. The name, 步步高 (BuBuGao), can be roughly translated from Chinese as "gradually growing" or "step by step, higher and higher."
Yongping managed to quickly attract public attention to BBK thanks to bright marketing. Using the experience of his previous work – the company producing games and consoles Subor – the businessman Bulk SMS Service in Sri Lanka decided to bet on advertising. BBK Electronics allocated large budgets by those standards to create videos with celebrities: Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
"After Jackie Chan became the brand ambassador, people started to remember the product after three viewings of the commercial. Without Jackie Chan, our name was remembered only after nine or ten viewings. According to my calculations, the money we paid the actor was only a tiny percentage of the total advertising costs, not even 10%. If he can increase the popularity of our products by even a few percent, it is worth it," Duan Yongping commented on his strategy.
Within a few years of its launch, BBK made its first attempts to expand beyond the DVD player market and introduced its first line of phones. Despite its product promotion efforts, the company failed to compete with Nokia and Motorola. BBK's voice recorders, cassette recorders, and educational computers proved to be much more successful.
It took Yongping just five years to turn BBK into a company with an annual output of 1 billion yuan, making him one of China's top businessmen at the turn of the century. However, that did not stop him from wanting to step away from business. The founder of BBK Electronics announced the splitting of the company into three divisions and left it in the early 2000s.
The emergence of the Oppo and Vivo bra
DVD players and the first attempts to enter the telephone market
In 1995, a young Chinese businessman, Duan Yongping, who had experience working in a factory and in the video game industry, founded a DVD player company, BBK Electronics. The name, 步步高 (BuBuGao), can be roughly translated from Chinese as "gradually growing" or "step by step, higher and higher."
Yongping managed to quickly attract public attention to BBK thanks to bright marketing. Using the experience of his previous work – the company producing games and consoles Subor – the businessman Bulk SMS Service in Sri Lanka decided to bet on advertising. BBK Electronics allocated large budgets by those standards to create videos with celebrities: Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
"After Jackie Chan became the brand ambassador, people started to remember the product after three viewings of the commercial. Without Jackie Chan, our name was remembered only after nine or ten viewings. According to my calculations, the money we paid the actor was only a tiny percentage of the total advertising costs, not even 10%. If he can increase the popularity of our products by even a few percent, it is worth it," Duan Yongping commented on his strategy.
Within a few years of its launch, BBK made its first attempts to expand beyond the DVD player market and introduced its first line of phones. Despite its product promotion efforts, the company failed to compete with Nokia and Motorola. BBK's voice recorders, cassette recorders, and educational computers proved to be much more successful.
It took Yongping just five years to turn BBK into a company with an annual output of 1 billion yuan, making him one of China's top businessmen at the turn of the century. However, that did not stop him from wanting to step away from business. The founder of BBK Electronics announced the splitting of the company into three divisions and left it in the early 2000s.
The emergence of the Oppo and Vivo bra