Oppo said that it is now working towards “ecosyetem development” through partnerships with academia and startups. The Chinese smartphone maker said that it is also open to working with Indian academia around the 6G technology.
Tasleem Arif, VP, and R&D Head, Oppo India said that the handset company’s headquarters is focused on 5G and 6G technologies and is looking to have collaboration on these areas.
“There will be more partnerships in India, which will help utilise the academic strength on research related collaboration. We also provide funds for the research in India,” he said.
Oppo has set up its third lab to focus on “Power and Performance” at its Hyderabad R&D center. It had previously set up a camera and 5G labs at the center. Investment in all these labs is part of its global investment of $7 billion R&D budget, which was announced in 2019. Now they are focusing on 6G.
Oppo has integrated OnePlus’ research and development with its own in India to bring better “synergies”.
The company had recently launched a program for startups in India to collaborate with them and find synergies. “Once shortlisted, we offer guidance on technology and allow them to utilise our labs and if there are synergies then we partner with them for products and services and provide support,” Arif said.
A similar program was launched by Oppo’s global team, which has also shortlisted a few Indian startups. “These startups lack infrastructure and guidance. We help them expand their services. Currently, at our India R&D premise 50% of space is dedicated to the Innovation lab,” he added.
“As part of our Innovation strategy, we created an in-house ‘Innovation’ team to cultivate the patent filing culture for the engineers through rigorous training…we have witnessed a significant growth of over 128% in 2021 in the number of patents filed by OPPO India. Over 280 patents till date by India R&D out of which 140 in 2021. Our team is working towards sustaining these numbers,” Arif said.
Oppo is closely working with Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel to better plan its product portfolio for the 5G technology. “We discuss our products and network support with them before launching,” he said.
Arif said that Oppo smartphones will support all possible 5G bands in India once the service is commercially available. “Our R&D teams are playing a crucial role here… whatever telcos decide in terms of network and spectrum planning comes to us and we accommodate the feedback for our product planning,” he added.
The executive said that Oppo may also launch its 5G-enabled customer premise equipment in India.” Private infrastructure requires such 5G devices… globally, we have received good response and we will decide on the launch once we have services available,” he added.
