Nothing’s more affordable CMF sub-brand is now turning into its own independent company, which will be majority Indian-owned, and will have its HQ and R&D in India. Nothing will stay on as a minority shareholder.
Nothing’s CEO Carl Pei thinks India will be the next country that will produce “its own global champions” in the tech space, following the likes of Japan, Korea, and China. The implication is that CMF will be one of the first such “global champions”, since it will have “real R&D” in the country, which he describes as “the ability to design, engineer, and keep improving a product in-house”.
According to Pei, “this is what separates a company that lasts from one that rides a moment”. He goes on to say that Indian brands lost out in 2015-2017 because “foreign brands arrived with what the domestic ones lacked: real engineering”. Pei thinks there’s “an opening” again today, and CMF won’t be a brand that simply chooses from what already exists, picking phones from a manufacturing partner. Instead, it will “build something new, cut cost by removing markup rather than quality, and get better every year”.
99% of the phones sold in India today are made in India, Pei says, and that’s “a massive industrial achievement”, but it’s only step one, and step two is R&D. A brand that will “drive the engineering demand”. Guess what? CMF is that brand. Last year, it was “India’s fastest growing smartphone sub-brand”, according to Pei. And the aim is for it to reach 100 million phones sold in a year.