CMF, Nothing’s consumer electronics brand, is set to become an independent, India-based company, with founder Carl Pei pushing to deepen the country’s R&D capabilities. The new entity will be carved out of Nothing, headquartered in India, and majority-owned by Indian shareholders, with its team and R&D activities based locally. Nothing will retain a stake and continue as a partner.
Pei – Swedish by nationality, with eight years in China before relocating to London – believes India has the ingredients to build its own global electronics brand: a strong manufacturing base, a massive smartphone market, a young population, and deep software talent. What’s missing, he says, is a homegrown global brand, and that gap is closing.
He frames the shift in terms of real R&D: owning the engineering behind materials, thermals and durability, choosing camera sensors and building imaging pipelines, writing and maintaining operating systems, re-certifying antennas, and co-engineering components directly with suppliers. Drawing on his experience building phones in Shenzhen from 2012, Pei notes how local manufacturers there pushed component suppliers to innovate – a dynamic he believes India can replicate.
He points out that 99% of phones sold in India are now manufactured domestically, up from near-zero a decade ago, calling this “step one.” R&D, he says, is the next frontier – the capability that pulls a full value chain into the country.
CMF aims to scale to 100 million phones annually, positioning India as a potential hub for shaping global supply chains rather than merely operating within them.
