Last week a report surfaced claiming that Nothing would be exiting “12 or more” global markets, following in the footsteps of OnePlus, the previous brand Nothing co-founder Carl Pei co-founded.
In the meantime, Nothing co-founder Akis Evangelidis has denied the claims in the aforementioned report, calling it “fake news”. He says the company is reorganizing its teams to prepare for its next phase of growth, introducing dedicated business units and “consolidating individual countries into regional hubs to operate much more efficiently”.
Evangelidis admits that these changes “have impacted certain positions”, but says “the reported numbers are way overblown”. The report in question claimed that Nothing was laying off 40% of its staff, with specifically its R&D teams being hit with 50% layoffs in China and 30-40% in London.
Nothing Phone (4a) Pro
The report also asserted that the Nothing Phone (4b) only sold 20,000 units since its debut earlier this month, but Evangelidis pushes back revealing that the device sold 29,537 units in its first day on sale alone, “breaking records in its price segment”. The OnePlus exec has called on “media to uphold factual reporting and journalistic integrity”, while also mentioning that “decisions that impact people’s livelihoods are never taken lightly”.
In response, the author of the original article claims the Nothing team had an entire week to respond to the findings in the report, but “had no official statement to offer and denied nothing” that was reported. Thus, the publication “stands by its story”.
While we have no idea what is actually happening at Nothing, we can say that if the sales numbers put forward by Akis Evangelidis are accurate (and we have no reason to believe a high-profile exec would lie about this), then the fact that the report got that totally wrong is quite concerning. If they got that one so wrong, then how can we be sure the rest of the report is even remotely accurate? The truth is we can’t.
On the other hand, it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for a company like Nothing to go through layoffs, especially in a period like this one, when smaller brands are disproportionately negatively impacted by the rising memory prices (and especially smaller brands that compete only at the mid-range and entry-level, where the margins are tight).