Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus on Saturday (April 25) announced significant redundancies across Europe with sources claiming that many regional offices, including UK, France and Germany downsizing their workforce by as much as 80 percent. It may be recalled that the teams in Spain and Italy faced the same phase in 2019 before being completely laid off. 


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Engadget reportd that a OnePlus spokesperson referred the redundancies as part of a “normal restructuring” in Europe in order to focus on key markets. Before the latest layoffs, OnePlus had around 2,000 employees worldwide.


"Europe is a very important market for us and has been since the beginning of OnePlus. We’re doing some strategic restructuring in Europe, and in fact are even hiring in the region," the spokesperson told Engadget.


Some claimed that the European restructuring is due to the coronavirus pandemic but it was bound to happen. In the case of the UK, the OnePlus 8 series is carried by just one network: 3. 


Ben Wood, Chief Analyst at CCS Insight, told Endgadget that OnePlus failed to expand beyond its finite number of fans and it happened mainly due to company's plan to shift towards premium devices which in turn alienated some of its core fan base. 


“Although OnePlus has had some notably strong relationships with carriers across Europe, there is growing evidence that it finds it hard to sustain relationships over a longer period,” Wood told Engadget. “This has seen OnePlus ‘jumping’ from one carrier to another with different generations of products. There also seems to be a growing sense that OnePlus has fallen into the trap of over-promising and under-delivering, which ironically is the complete opposite of how it behaved in the early days.”