Every country that has manufactured consumer electronics at scale has eventually produced its own global champions. Japan did. Korea did. China did, and I watched it happen over the better part of a decade living there.
India is next. It's already the world's second largest smartphone manufacturer, with the largest youth population on earth and one of its deepest software talent pools. What it doesn't have yet is a global consumer electronics brand of its own. That will change. The only questions are when, and how.
The how is R&D. Real R&D: the ability to design, engineer and keep improving a product in-house. It's what separates a company that lasts from one that rides a moment. Nothing has built exactly that, and shipped it to millions of people worldwide. Now the opportunity is to take it to India and scale it 100x.
I'm not Indian. I'm a Swede who spent eight years in China and runs a company from London. So let me be plain about why I care. I've seen this happen once. I know what it takes. And we've already built the pieces that are missing. We think we can be India's partner in this. So we're spinning CMF out of Nothing into a standalone Indian company: majority Indian owned, headquartered in India, with its own team and R&D in the country. Nothing stays as a shareholder and partner. CMF becomes Indian.
We've seen this before
Rewind to 2015. Indian brands sold close to half the smartphones in the country. One of them was briefly the best-selling brand in India, ahead of Samsung. It looked like the start of something.
It wasn't. Within two years, foreign brands arrived with what the domestic ones lacked: real engineering. A genuinely better phone every year, with new camera systems, tighter integration, better design. The domestic brands were licensing an off-the-shelf design, changing the back cover and adding a logo. By 2025 they held less than 1% of a market they once led.
There's an opening again today, and new brands are moving into it. That part is easy. What 2015 taught is that the hard part comes later, when the window closes and only the product is left. The better engineered phone wins.
What "real R&D" actually means
A lot of brands claim it, so let me be specific. Real R&D is five things you can check. Who engineers the structure: the materials, the thermals, the durability, beyond the colors? Who selects the camera sensors and builds the imaging pipeline? Who writes and maintains the operating system, and commits to years of updates? Who re-tunes and certifies the antennas when the design changes? And who works directly with suppliers to qualify and co-engineer the displays, chipsets and camera modules?
If the honest answer to most of those is "our manufacturing partner," the brand is picking a phone, not engineering one. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just a ceiling. A brand that can only choose from what already exists can mostly compete on price, and someone cheaper always shows up. A brand that owns its R&D can build something new, cut cost by removing markup rather than quality, and get better every year.
Ecosystems form around hard questions
I moved from Stockholm to Shenzhen in 2012 to build phones. Back then, the best displays came from Korea, the best camera modules from Japan, and Chinese suppliers mostly made the cheaper stuff. By the time I left in 2020, that had flipped. Chinese suppliers were among the biggest in the world, shipping some of the best components on the market, from OLED panels to camera modules to in-display fingerprint sensors.
Policy alone didn't do that. Chinese phone makers built real engineering teams that refused to accept the catalog. A thinner module. A brighter panel. A hinge that survives 200,000 folds. Every impossible request forced a supplier to build a capability it didn't have, and every new capability lifted everyone else. Suppliers stopped being vendors and became engineering partners. Within a decade, suppliers that started on one Chinese brand's demand were serving the entire industry, including the American and Korean giants they'd once trailed.
The brands that came out of that decade with durable businesses weren't the biggest or the best funded at the start. They were the ones that didn't settle, so when the ecosystem formed, it formed around them.
That's what real R&D does. It makes a better phone, and over time it builds the ecosystem around it.
Manufacturing was step one
99% of phones sold in India are now made in India, up from almost nothing a decade ago. The government made local manufacturing a priority and stayed the course for ten years. That's a massive industrial achievement.
Source: CNBCTV18.com - India ranks second in mobile production with 'Make in India' driving 2 billion devices: Report
But manufacturing is step one. Step two is R&D: the capability that sets harder problems for suppliers and pulls a full value chain into the country. Some components are made locally today, but most of the underlying IP still sits offshore, because nobody in India is asking for more than what's on the shelf.
India has the manufacturing base, a market absorbing over 150 million smartphones a year, and a government determined to make the country a global export hub. What it lacks is the brand to drive the engineering demand.
That's our opportunity.
We've already built it
Nothing builds for the next generation. By that I mean the people who set trends, whatever their age. India is now their center of gravity, with several hundred million people under 30 deciding what a phone should be next.
And we've built what an anchor brand needs. We write our own operating system: Nothing OS is a full in-house Android build with our own camera processing and features, updated on schedule for every device since 2021, and recently voted India's #1 Android experience. We do our own industrial design, with multiple Red Dot and iF awards. We source and co-engineer displays, chipsets and camera modules directly with the suppliers that make them. And we sell millions of products across the world, India included.
CMF was born from that foundation, and in 2025 it was India's fastest growing smartphone sub-brand.
A partner, not a trader
Foreign brands have come to India for its demand before. They shipped what they had, kept the engineering offshore, and left India with assembly lines and little upstream of them. In China, the ecosystem formed around Chinese brands. In India, there's still no brand for it to form around.
Being a partner means the company is Indian: owned in India, run from India, engineered in India. It means the scale we build compounds inside the country, in its suppliers, its talent and its engineering culture.
That's what the spin-out is. CMF stops being a product line inside a London company and becomes a company of its own, incorporated in India, controlled in India, majority owned by Indian shareholders. Nothing keeps a stake and stays as its partner. The engineering DNA, the OS, the supplier relationships and the global brand engine come with it. We bring what we've built. India brings the market, the talent and the ambition.
A path to 100 million phones
100 million a year is the line between a brand and a platform. Below it, you're a customer of the supply chain. Above it, you're the reason it exists. Suppliers build to your spec. An OS team, a camera team, an AI stack stop being costs and become advantages, spread across 100 million devices instead of a few. Everything we're good at today gets ten times stronger.
Only a handful of companies on earth have ever crossed that line. India is the best place left for a new entrant to do it, and the only way to get there and stay there is to build in India, not ship to India.
Finally
When we made the decision, what I felt was adrenaline. Six years of building things we're proud of, for a few million people a year, in an industry that ships a billion phones that mostly look the same. Design awards, a real OS, a real engineering team, and a ceiling. Finally, we have a path to build for tens of millions, in the market that will decide what the next decade of consumer electronics looks like.
India will produce global consumer electronics companies. The only question is when, and that depends on who builds them. Teams that already know what it takes will get there fast. We've seen it. We've built the parts. We're here to partner.
Last cycle, I moved to the country that was about to do this. This time I'd like to help build the cycle.
