CMF will become a majority Indian-owned company, Carl Pei says

Nothing‘s plan to separate CMF from the main brand has a new detail. Carl Pei says CMF will become its own company, majority-owned by Indian shareholders and based in India, with its own team and R&D there. Nothing will stay on as a shareholder and partner.

Pei shared the plan in a long post on X. It follows the spin-off Nothing announced in September 2025, when it said CMF would become an independent subsidiary with India as its base. Nothing also said it would invest more than $100 million in a joint venture with Optiemus to handle CMF’s production locally, creating around 1,800 jobs over three years. You can read our earlier report on that announcement.

CMF was then registered as a separate company, CMF India Private Limited, in December 2025. The new part is who owns it: Indian shareholders will hold the majority.

CMF launched in September 2023 as Nothing’s lower-priced brand, and India quickly became its largest market. CMF’s phones sell for under $200, and IDC data shows that phones in the $100 to $200 range made up over 42% of India’s shipments in the second quarter of 2025. That gives CMF a large market to sell into at home.

What Pei says will change

According to Pei, CMF will take Nothing OS, the engineering team, the supplier relationships, and the brand operation with it. Nothing OS is the Android software Nothing builds itself, and Pei says it has received scheduled updates on every Nothing device since 2021.

He also wants CMF to do more of the engineering itself. He lists what that covers: designing the phone’s structure, including materials, heat management and durability; choosing camera sensors and building the camera software; writing the operating system and committing to updates; tuning and certifying the antennas; and working with suppliers on displays, chipsets and camera modules. In his view, a brand that leaves most of that to its manufacturing partner is picking a phone from a catalog, and can mostly compete on price.

He backs this up with some history. In 2015, Indian brands sold close to half of the phones in India. Pei says many of them reused ready-made designs from manufacturers, and when foreign brands arrived with better engineering, the domestic share fell to under 1% by 2025. He adds that 99% of phones sold in India are now made there, so he sees engineering as the next step after manufacturing.

Pei’s goal is 100 million phones a year. He says that’s the volume where suppliers start building parts to a brand’s requirements instead of selling what they already make.

What’s still unclear

Pei’s post doesn’t name the Indian shareholders, explain how the ownership will be split, or give a date for the change. It also doesn’t say who will handle Nothing OS updates and support after the move, which matters if you own a CMF phone.

The current lineup is small, too. In June, Nothing co-founder Akis Evangelidis said CMF would skip a new phone in 2026, because rising memory costs made a successor to the CMF Phone 2 Pro hard to build at a CMF price. Here is our report from June. He said other CMF products, including some in new categories, are still planned for this year. Until those arrive, the CMF Phone 2 Pro remains CMF’s newest phone.

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(Source)