India’s smartphone market has always been a contradiction. It is deeply price-conscious, yet increasingly willing to spend big when the product feels worth it. Sitting down with Goldee Patnaik, Head of PR and Communications at OPPO India, and Simon Liu, OPPO’s Global Imaging Director, I got the sense that OPPO sees the Find X9 Ultra not merely as another premium smartphone, but as its clearest bet yet on India’s growing appetite for “ultra” flagships.
Patnaik framed it in terms of a shift that he believes is already underway in India. “Consumers are moving from a price mindset to a value mindset,” he told me, pointing to growth in the premium and ultra-premium segments. For him, the smartphone is no longer “just a tool”, it has become a camera, a creative device, an editing tool and, in many ways, a lifestyle product.
That shift matters because OPPO knows the Find X9 Ultra will not be an impulse buy. It is expected to sit in a segment dominated by the likes of Apple and Samsung, where brand equity matters as much as hardware.
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Patnaik’s answer to that challenge was straightforward: the Find X9 Ultra, he argued, is about delivering value that justifies the spend.
“It’s not about moving from a good camera smartphone,” he said. “It’s about moving to a true imaging system, a complete imaging system.” He also emphasised what he called an “end-to-end workflow,” where the process of creating, editing and sharing content happens seamlessly on the phone itself, without friction across multiple apps.
That creator-first pitch came up repeatedly in our conversation.
“The Find series stands for creators,” Patnaik said. “It’s a creator-first device.” In his view, India’s youth are no longer just consuming content; they are creating it, whether for fun, for their communities or as aspiring influencers, and smartphones need to reflect that behavioural shift.
Simon Liu, meanwhile, focused less on market dynamics and more on what actually makes the Ultra “ultra”.
“The most obvious thing would be the built-in telephoto system,” he told me, explaining that where previous solutions often required additional accessories, the Ultra integrates more of that capability directly into the phone. “This would be the biggest, most significant difference.” He added that “pretty much all four or five sensors have upgraded,” meaning image quality itself has also taken a step forward.
One of the more interesting technical discussions centred around OPPO’s sensor choice.
Instead of chasing the now-popular one-inch sensor narrative, Liu explained that OPPO chose a different route.
“When you want to get more photons, increasing the sensor is not the only path,” he said. “What we did was change the aperture… with this way, we see it as a more balanced choice for this current product.” He was careful not to call it superior, describing it instead as “two different strategies”.
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That philosophy, balance over spec-sheet one-upmanship, seems central to OPPO’s imaging direction.
Liu also spoke about OPPO’s continued collaboration with Hasselblad, though he made an important distinction between branding partnerships and technological ones.
“I clearly see benefits coming from the technology part,” he said. “We observe what they have already built, use their understandings, and incorporate them into the technology.” He specifically pointed to colour science, portrait rendering and skin tone treatment as areas where Hasselblad’s influence runs deeper than just marketing.
“In terms of colour and tone, they are a very high percentage close to Hasselblad.”
It is perhaps here that OPPO’s ambition becomes clearest.
Patnaik compared smartphone brand choices to luxury cars, “there is BMW, there is Mercedes, there is Jaguar,” suggesting that aspiration and identity play a role in tech purchases too. For OPPO, the Find X9 Ultra is meant to be that aspirational product for creators and imaging enthusiasts.
And yet, OPPO knows India still needs convincing at the ultra-premium end.
That is why Patnaik repeatedly returned to one word: value.
“I don’t see any reason why a consumer would feel a hitch to make that choice,” he said, arguing that when a flagship delivers on imaging, AI, performance, durability and workflow, it becomes “a complete value” rather than just an expensive phone. “It’s not a flagship which promises just a good battery or a design. It has all the attributes or ingredients which youth would seek for today.”
After speaking to both executives, I came away with the impression that OPPO’s Find X9 Ultra is not simply trying to win a camera war. It is trying to establish what an ultra flagship should mean in India: a device that justifies its price not through specs alone, but through the promise of becoming a creator’s all-in-one imaging machine. Whether Indian consumers buy into that vision at scale remains to be seen, but OPPO clearly believes the market is ready.
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