CMF is becoming a fully independent, majority Indian-owned company, according to Nothing co-founder Carl Pei, who laid out the plan in a post on X. Nothing will remain a shareholder and partner, but CMF will run its own engineering, supplier relationships, and India-based team going forward.
What’s Changing
This builds on a spin-off Nothing first announced in September 2025, when CMF was set to become an independent subsidiary based in India, backed by a $100 million joint venture with Optiemus to localize production and create roughly 1,800 jobs over three years. CMF India Private Limited was formally registered in December 2025. What’s new now, per Pei, is that Indian shareholders will hold a majority stake in the company itself, not just its manufacturing arm.
Pei says CMF will take Nothing OS — the Android software Nothing has built and updated on every device since 2021 — along with the engineering team, supplier relationships, and brand operations, into the new entity. He’s also pushing CMF toward doing more of its own hardware engineering: choosing camera sensors, tuning antennas, and working directly with display and chipset suppliers rather than relying heavily on a manufacturing partner’s existing designs.
Why India, and Why It Matters for CMF Buyers
India is already CMF’s largest market. IDC data cited in Pei’s reasoning shows phones priced between $100 and $200 made up more than 42% of India’s smartphone shipments in mid-2025 — squarely where CMF’s lineup sits. Pei’s longer-term target is 100 million phones a year, which he frames as the volume needed for suppliers to build components to CMF’s own specifications instead of selling off-the-shelf parts.
What isn’t clear yet: who the Indian shareholders are, how the ownership split works, when the change actually takes effect, and — most relevantly if you already own a CMF phone — who handles Nothing OS software updates and support once CMF operates independently of Nothing. None of that has been addressed publicly.
The move also comes as CMF’s product pipeline has gone quiet. Nothing co-founder Akis Evangelidis said in June that CMF would skip a new phone release in 2026 because rising memory costs made a successor to the CMF Phone 2 Pro difficult to build at CMF’s usual price point. The CMF Phone 2 Pro remains the brand’s newest phone for now, with other product categories still said to be planned before the end of the year.
Source: Gizmochina
