Carl Pei is announcing a standalone Indian company. He wants that China success

CMF is divesting from Nothing and it'll be a standalone Indian company.

CMF will be majority Indian-owned and headquartered in India with its own team and R&D in the country. But Nothing will stay as a shareholder and partner. "CMF becomes Indian", Carl Pei says.

After Japan, Korea and China, now it's India's turn

Nothing's founder and CEO has a lengthy post over at X, where he talks about the big picture.

Carl Pei argues that countries that become major consumer electronics manufacturing hubs eventually produce homegrown brands that succeed globally, pointing to Japan, South Korea and China as examples. He believes India is next, given its huge smartphone manufacturing base, young population and strong software talent, although it still lacks a major global consumer electronics brand.

What does it take to make it big?

According to Pei, the key to changing that is genuine in-house R&D (research and development). Not simply assembling or selling products, but developing, engineering and continuously improving them internally.

He says Nothing has already built much of that capability and sees an opportunity to bring it to India and scale it dramatically. Pei reminds us that he's Swedish but spent eight years in China and runs Nothing from London. He has seen this transformation happen before and believes Nothing can help India build the missing pieces needed for a globally successful consumer electronics company.

The "real R&D" moment

Pei defines "real R&D" as having control over the core technology behind a product rather than simply selecting components from a manufacturing partner. That includes engineering the phone's structure and thermals, choosing camera sensors and developing the imaging system, maintaining the operating system, tuning antennas and working directly with suppliers on displays, chipsets and camera modules.

In the end, brands that outsource most of this work are essentially choosing from existing technology, which limits how much they can differentiate beyond price.

The 100 million phones a year

Carl Pei also sees reaching 100 million phones a year as the point where a company stops being just another customer of the supply chain and starts shaping it. At that scale, suppliers can build specifically to the company's requirements, while software, camera and AI teams can turn into competitive advantages that are spread across a huge user base.

For Pei, the decision represents a chance to take what Nothing has built over six years (phone design, operating system and engineering capabilities) and expand it from a few million users to tens of millions in a market he believes will play a major role in the next decade of consumer electronics.

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