The man behind the world's largest phone empire (the story of BBK)

this video was sponsored by curiositystream in partnership with my streaming service nebula i recently ran a poll asking my twitter followers if they've ever heard of a guy called doyonping and it seems like even from my pretty tacky audience only about two percent knew who he was while he himself is largely unknown his company bbk might ring a few bells to a slightly larger group of phone geeks and eagle-eyed observers might have noticed that the five brands his empire have spawned have just collectively made the bbk group the largest filmmaker of the world last quarter overtaking competitors like apple xiaomi and even samsung most viewers probably don't know much about mr duan and his businesses because unlike with other tech entrepreneurs like elon musk or steve jobs or even some of the chinese ones like jack ma for example there is actually very little information available on him online and that is despite wyong ping having created the world's largest phone empire with an incredible sense for technology and business despite him living in california for almost 20 years now and despite being one of apple's largest private shareholders but still almost everything we know about him came from a few vague interviews most of which are in chinese and almost all of which were recorded at least a decade ago plus his own blog where his last two articles are sadly testing and testing as my long-term viewers will know i used to work for oppo which of course is part of the bbk empire and since they have just taken over the number one spot i decided it was time to dig deeper so in a 76 episode of the story behind series let's explore how one unconventional and mostly unknown man created an empire [Music] from day one working at oppo blew my mind from product to marketing strategies and salaries to corporate mission statements during my almost three years with the company i found every core aspect of the company wildly unintuitive and thoroughly fascinating and only during my research with this video that i realized that almost all of that could be traced back to the company's original founder mr duan graduated first as a radio engineer from jojang university in the 80s and later studied economics at the renmin university in beijing fun fact that is the university i did my exchange semester in as well anyway almost straight out of university mr duan became the factory manager of a minor electronics company on the verge of bankruptcy in the southern chinese city of zhongshan and right away he created an economic miracle like most chinese electronics players at the time mr duan started his career with what is known as shanghai basically copycat products and replicas at the time the nintendo was blowing up abroad but couldn't really be bought anywhere in china so duan teamed up with chip maker media attack to make a clone for the local market mediatek with the time was known as the shanzai king reverse engineered the chip of nintendo and together with dwan they created the xiaobawang game console unlike most shanghai products of the time though the xiaobawang game console basically became a countrywide success almost overnight and every chinese friend of mine that is approximately my age either had one or desperately wanted one besides just being a decent imitation duan's genius was in how he took the product further first after making the console itself he added a keyboard and some dictionary software to it and in a cheeky move he called the whole thing a learning machine this move suddenly made the machine attractive to both education-obsessed chinese parents as well as their savvy kids who of course understood that they could still play games on the machine and could now try to convince their parents that they desperately needed this machine you know to get better at school or something second the company hired the then red hearted jackie chan and ran a series of high profile tv ads with him across the country which brilliantly used this chinese proverb as their slogan loosely translatable to wishing your kid to grow up to become a dragon which of course is an idiom for success through education the last two characters of that saying are also the chinese name of jackie chan it was a smart play of words and the ad became a massive success tuan had an incredible feel for marketing from the start and while he would tweak his formula later on his love for a-list celebrities combined with very catchy slogans would continue for the rest of his career and third he was also incredibly generous with the people that he worked with he treated business partners ridiculously well often even giving them loans and extensions if they were in trouble when most of his competitors were instead squeezing the same suppliers for every last penny and once his company awarded one with a huge chunk of money for having made the company wildly successful he took most of that and just handed it out as cash to employees i don't know how much of this is an urban legend but from the blog articles that i found online he apparently gave out so much cash to people that some of them could straight away buy entire apartments from their first bonuses and apparently huawei's founder jean-jan fei called him the best boss at giving away money so he quickly developed a 10-step strategy for success first you make a good product it doesn't need to be particularly original but it needs to be actually good and something that many many people will want then step 2 to step 9 are marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing and more marketing in crowded markets you can't underestimate how important good marketing is to stand out and as a final step you have an overwhelming sense of integrity and generosity with the people that you work with problem is the rest of the management didn't enjoy him so generously handing out money to stakeholders so they clashed dwan eventually quit and founded his own company called bbk he only took six employees and whatever was left of his own money with him but because of how ridiculously well he treated everyone before almost all of his suppliers and distributors just followed him and helped him build his new business right back up in a fashion that duan actually wanted of course employees received actual equity right from the start the company started churning out pretty competent vcd players as their first product category due to the strong suppliers that followed duong and then it was time for you've guessed it marketing so much marketing as a fresh startup bbk hired jet freakingly probably the country's top star at the time almost as soon as it had a product and launched a series of incredibly catchy ads with him including and i'm not kidding you a full length music video mimicking the revolutionary songs that were popular in tv back then which he distributed to karaoke parlors across the country so the karaoke obsessed nation would regularly sing their ads just as a fun pastime activity with friends [Music] incredible beside that he also signed on arnold schwarzenegger during the height of his career and despite bbk apparently not even being able to actually run his ads for reasons that would take me too long to explain mr duan apparently insisted on paying him out in full anyway to the disbelief of pretty much everyone cause integrity i've left the link to a bunch of old bbk ads down in the description they're quite ridiculous and i think they clearly showed that mr duan was one of the marketing geniuses of his time and it's probably also why many of my chinese friends referred to bbk as sort of the brainwashing factory so with all 10 steps checked off of the list bbk once again became wildly successful beat hundreds of competitors and dominated the vcd and dvd markets in china and beside this category they also got into learning machines again as well as phones and quickly decided it would make the most sense to actually split these three into separate brands learning machines stayed with bbk oppo became a new brand originally created for the audio visual products and vivo was created to run the company's phone business with the three new ceos all coming from the original six employees don took with him from xiaobawa tony chen for example the ceo of oppo to this day started as an intern under duon in the 80s and with these three brands now in place and in the hands of his carefully groomed disciples dwan at the age of 39 unexpectedly retired from the electronics business he moved to california to spend the rest of his life in relative peace and quiet and left the new ceos mostly alone while he focused on investing his own wealth into stocks which he of course also turned out to be ridiculously good at anyway initially there was a pretty clear separation between the three brands because of course they were making different products but over time those clear lines started to blur first the bbk brand faded away as learning machines mostly went out of fashion then as vcd players went out of fashion two oppo spawned that part of the business out into a semi-separate company and instead focused on the then popular mp3 and mp4 players i actually remember that my first experience with the oppo brand ever was through an mp3 player because back then i was an exchange student in china in about 2007 and i had a friend who had an oppo mp3 player that could display the lyrics to songs and i thought that was a fantastic way to learn chinese so i bought one but then as phones started replacing dedicated audio players oppo got into those two creating the awkward situation of bbk's two remaining brands becoming direct competitors and as i researched mr duan's past it kind of dawned on me just how thoroughly his kind of philosophy and worldview and business ideas shaped these two companies and their strategies as well much like bbk these two brands invested into obscene amounts of marketing especially preferring to sponsor celebrities oppo's first smartphone ever for example was promoted in china by none other than leonardo dicaprio and almost every oppo launch that i managed to attend there was either a famous indian cricket player or a huge pop star from whatever country we were in right now it was wild and their product strategies followed mr dwan's philosophy too instead of chasing the bleeding edge and entering a ton of categories like xiaomi or samsung typically do oppo and vivo despite having hundreds of thousands of employees have for the longest time really only done phones plus maybe a few accessories and even there they're typically much slower to adopt risky categories like foldables than their competitors and while this approach can sometimes frustrate us the tech enthusiasts it isn't really a sign of laziness but rather a conscious choice and a sort of manifestation of one of mr duan's most famous sayings roughly translating to dare to be last and then take the lead from there he said that his companies should let others try the risky experiments while they patiently wait until they can be pretty sure that their products will be a success the bbk name which translates to going up step by step captures this intentionally slow and focused approach this approach likes to avoid big risky leaps and even though it is kind of boring it instead ensures that the companies almost never release products that actually flop hard like many of the first foldables did for example and finally the two are also obsessed with giving back too treating most of their business partners much better than the competition which is why small retailers around the world are willing to paint their streets green and blue just to get the chance to sell their phones both companies are also majority owned by employees and at least the one that i worked for actually provided huge bonus payouts to employees whenever the company made a big profit this is a very conservative strategy and it means that these brands are unlikely to be at the forefront of the next big thing it also means that they're unlikely to provide the absolute best bang for a buck for their consumers but they create safe sustainable brands that over time just go up step by step little and little and they grow and they will probably last forever and that is how mr dwan built the foundations of his empire and if you're wondering how the multi-brand strategy of the current bbk actually combines with that i've made some bonus content explaining just that that you can watch at the end of the nebula version of this video that you can find linked in the description nebula is of course our very own video streaming service built and owned by creators like myself real engineering polymeter and many others including lately even mkbhd it's a platform without any ads or nasty tracking and there's no algorithm to worry about so it allows you to just watch stuff that you want without interruptions and it allows us to just make good content for you that includes all of our regular youtube videos ad free of course and in the case of tech out are usually a day or two early it includes little nebula plus add-ons to videos with stuff that didn't quite make it to the youtube versions like this one and it includes a ton of high quality nebula originals like hour-long documentaries from your favorite creators that are only available on nebula we have also just released a completely reworked version of the app so if you haven't tried it in a while everything on the service should work much faster now than it did in the past and best of all you can get access to nebula for free with a subscription to my sponsor curiosity stream which itself is less than 15 bucks for an entire year that's like barely more than a dollar a month curiosity stream is of course the premier place on the internet for high quality professional documentaries from the founder of the discovery channel and they have a huge library of nature science and history content to binge while you are stuck at home i have recently finished watching an episode of catalyst on curiosity stream which took a closer look at the potential of quantum computing and there is a ton of other great content here from hosts like david attenborough jane goodall stephen hawking and more so check them out at the link in the description and i'll see you next week

Channel: TechAltar

Views: 584,597

Rating: 4.9316726 out of 5

Keywords: Bbk, Oppo, Oneplus, Vivo, Realme, Iqoo, Duan Yongping, Duanyongping, Apple, Tycoon, Founder, CEO, Chairman, Bbk founder, Story behind, Analysis, History, Business, Strategy, Company, Jet li, Commercials, Jackie Chan, What is BBK, Who is the founder of BBK, Are oppo and Vivo the same company, Oplus, Is OnePlus owned by oppo, Are oppo and OnePlus the same company, Oppo Vivo OnePlus same company, Oppo Vivo realme owner name, Owner name, Oppo realme

Id: VIggp85vgZA

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Sat May 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/deyesed]

I had my parents' old hand-me-down BBK cassette player for English tapes in the late 90s in China.

[u/TechAltar]

Thanks for the feature ✌️

[u/MarioNoir]

The story behind how BBK was founded is quite interesting. It's also great how the founder retired at 39 years old. That's what I would do in a similar situation.

[u/shashi154263]

TIL that IQOO is also of BBK!!!

[u/AJStylezp1]

TechAltar videos are always interesting.

[u/batgod221]

Wish he explained a bit about oneplus as well.

[u/Angelsdontkill_]

What an amazing video. Really learned a lot.

[u/GuruDev1000]

So much life advice here!