Pei was born in 1989 in Beijing, China, shortly after which he along with his parents moved to the United States. A couple of years later, his family moved to Sweden, where Pei grew up. Pei pursued his Bachelor degree of Science in 2008 at the Stockholm School of Economics, but dropped out in 2011 to work full-time in the smartphone industry.
Career
Pei joined Nokia in 2010, and worked at the company for three months. After Nokia, the fan website Pei had created about Meizu had caught the attention of the company's Hong Kong branch, where Pei started working in Meizu's marketing team in 2011. In November 2012, Pei joined Oppo as its international markets manager, where he worked directly under Pete Lau.
OnePlus
Pei co-founded OnePlus with Pete Lau in December 2013. Their first OnePlus device, the OnePlus One, sold close to a million units in 2014, despite a sales target of only 50,000, according to Pei. In July 2015, Pei presented the OnePlus 2 through a virtual reality video on YouTube. It was claimed to be the first product launch in virtual reality, and the video has been viewed over 294,000 times as of April 2020. After the unveiling of the OnePlus 3 in June 2016 Pei claimed it was the company's most popular smartphone, based off the Net Promoter Score tracked by OnePlus. When asked about the reasoning about releasing the OnePlus 3T only a few months later in November 2016, Pei said the reason for the upgrade from the OnePlus 3 to the OnePlus 3T was because they did not want to wait to improve the hardware. Pei claimed the OnePlus 5 to be the fastest-selling OnePlus device to date shortly after its release in June 2017.
Publicity
In July 2015, Pei was interviewed by The Wall Street Journal about how OnePlus was created. Pei stated:
One of the reasons why we started this company was we looked at all the Android phones on the market and there wasn't one phone that was good enough for us ourselves to use.
In June 2015, Pei was interviewed by Forbes about the globalization of OnePlus. Pei stated:
OnePlus wasn’t meant to become a global company at the beginning. The main focus was taking on the China market. When we started the company, we built a management team with a lot of experience in the China market. But for the global markets team, we are a bunch of young people without a lot of experience. It was just like an experiment, “Hey, do the global markets and see what happens. Do whatever you want.” We call our group “a Shenzhen within our company”, or a start-up within a bigger company.
We don’t really think of ourselves as a Chinese start-up. Very soon our sales outside of China will surpass sales in China.
Awards
In April 2016, Pei was included in the 2016 edition of the Marketing Week Vision 100 list for his marketing achievements. In January 2016, Pei was included in the 2016 edition of the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for his influence in the technology industry.
