In a bid to capitalise on the manufacturing boom in India, smartphone manufacturer Nothing is spinning off its sub-brand CMF to operate as an independent Indian company
CMF was launched by Nothing in 2023, and its India entity was incorporated in December 2025 with ROC Delhi
CMF will now operate as a standalone Indian company, majority Indian owned and headquartered in the country. Nothing will keep a stake in CMF and stay as its partner
In a bid to capitalise on the manufacturing boom in India, smartphone manufacturer Nothing is spinning off its sub-brand CMF to operate as an independent Indian company.
Disclosing the news via a social media post, cofounder and CEO Carl Pei said that CMF will now operate as a standalone Indian company, majority Indian owned and headquartered in the country. Nothing will keep a stake in CMF and stay as its partner.
“India has the manufacturing base, a market absorbing over 150 Mn 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,” the post read.
The move, as per Pei, is aimed at building the engineering capabilities needed to turn India’s manufacturing base into globally competitive consumer electronics companies.
He argued that while 99% smartphones sold in India are now manufactured locally, much of the underlying product development and intellectual property remains overseas.
Drawing on his experience in China, Pei said local brands that invested in R&D helped build a deeper supplier ecosystem, with manufacturers eventually becoming engineering partners rather than simply contract suppliers.
He contrasted this with India’s smartphone market in 2015, when domestic brands accounted for nearly half of sales but subsequently lost ground to global players with stronger engineering capabilities.
CMF will seek to address this gap by bringing Nothing’s existing product development capabilities into India. Pei said the company already handles industrial design, software, camera processing and supplier co-engineering, while CMF has grown rapidly in the Indian market.
The long-term ambition is to scale CMF to 100 Mn phones a year, which Pei described as the point where a brand becomes a platform capable of driving its own supply chain and engineering ecosystem.
Launched by Nothing in 2023, CMF (which stands for Colour, Material, Finish) is a more affordable, design-led consumer electronics brand for price-conscious consumers. Its initial products were the CMF Watch Pro, CMF Buds Pro and CMF Power 65 charger. It subsequently expanded into smartphones, earbuds, headphones and smartwatches.
With the spin-off, Pei sees CMF moving beyond a product line inside the company but becoming a company of its own. “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,” he noted.
Important to highlight that CMF’s India entity was incorporated in December 2025 with ROC Delhi. Cofounder and India president Akis Evangelidis and CFO Hemanth Kundavaram are the directors of the business.
In September 2025, Nothing also formed a joint venture (JV) with Noida-based Optiemus Infracom to establish India as the global production and export hub for Nothing and CMF products. The JV was part of Nothing’s plan to establish CMF as an independent India-based business to help the company make India its base for operations, R&D and manufacturing moving forward.
As per the JV agreement, CMF and Optiemus Infracom planned to invest over $100 Mn over the next three years in the country.
Carl Pei has increasingly framed CMF as something bigger than simply a budget product line. He mentioned that India has already developed significant electronics manufacturing capability, but the next step is building R&D, engineering and product-development capabilities domestically.
India is now the world’s second largest mobile phone manufacturer by volume, with 99.2% of mobile phones used in the country made domestically.
Global smartphone giants ranging from Apple and Samsung to Google and Nothing are increasingly improving their manufacturing capabilities in the country.
While the bigger brands have been eyeing a big share of their production in India to export, Pei claimed that his focus is on serving the domestic audience. It is seizing the opportunity to build CMF as a local brand that caters to the large consumer market in India.
This comes at a time when India seeks to move beyond assembling mobile phones and increase domestic value addition across the supply chain.
Earlier in August, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) notified the ₹62,500 Cr Mobile Phone Manufacturing Scheme (MPMS) to expand domestic production, deepen local value addition, and support Indian-owned mobile phone brands.
Indian brands will be eligible for an incentive of 5%, along with an additional 3% for Indian design and R&D.
Mobile phone production rose from ₹18,900 Cr in FY15 to ₹6.27 Lakh Cr in FY26, while exports jumped from ₹1,566 Cr to ₹2.60 Lakh Cr during the same period.
Source: Inc42
