OPPO

Full briefing

OPPO is a Chinese consumer electronics company headquartered in Dongguan, Guangdong, and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of BBK Electronics — the same parent company as Vivo, OnePlus, and Realme. Under the BBK umbrella, OPPO is the second-largest smartphone brand in China by domestic market share, and globally it ranks in the top 5 by shipment volume. In 2023, OPPO shipped approximately 100 million smartphones under the OPPO and OnePlus brands combined, with Realme adding tens of millions more devices at lower price points. The company operates across more than 60 countries with particular strength in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. OPPO's chip sourcing follows the standard model for Chinese Android OEMs: premium flagships use Qualcomm Snapdragon (the Find X7 Pro uses Snapdragon 8 Gen 3), while mid-range and budget devices use MediaTek Dimensity SoCs. This positions OPPO as a significant downstream customer for both Qualcomm (which designs its chips and has them fabbed primarily by TSMC) and MediaTek (which designs chips fabbed by TSMC and to a lesser extent Samsung Foundry). OPPO's aggregate chip purchasing makes it a meaningful volume customer for both companies. OPPO's most significant supply chain innovation was the MariSilicon X, announced in December 2021 — one of the first custom NPU chips developed by a Chinese smartphone OEM specifically for AI-enhanced photography. The MariSilicon X is a dedicated image signal processing (ISP) chip co-designed as an NPU, fabricated on TSMC's 6nm process (N6). It features a custom architecture with 18 TOPS of AI compute specifically tuned for night photography, RAW processing, and video stabilization. The chip was integrated into the OPPO Find X5 Pro (2022) alongside the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoC, illustrating a "two-chip" design strategy where the main SoC handles general compute while the MariSilicon X handles camera pipeline workloads. However, OPPO discontinued its custom chip development program in 2023 amid cost pressures and broader industry headwinds for the Chinese tech sector. The OPPO Chip Design subsidiary (previously known as Zeku) was shut down in May 2023, ending the MariSilicon roadmap. The decision reflected the high cost and long time horizons of semiconductor R&D versus the commodity pricing pressure in the smartphone market. OPPO has since returned to a pure merchant silicon model, relying entirely on Qualcomm and MediaTek for its chip supply — though the MariSilicon X remains in deployment in devices sold before the shutdown. OPPO's AI features are now implemented through the on-device NPU capabilities of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8-series and MediaTek Dimensity 9000-series SoCs, combined with cloud AI inference via OPPO's ColorOS software platform. OPPO has invested in generative AI features including AI-powered portrait enhancement, real-time translation, and on-device summarization — all reliant on the NPU blocks within the Qualcomm and MediaTek SoCs rather than proprietary silicon. This makes OPPO's AI capability roadmap directly dependent on Qualcomm's and MediaTek's NPU development timelines, a dependency that will shape how quickly OPPO can differentiate its AI features from other Android OEMs using the same chip generations.