CMF splits from Nothing and becomes Indian company
India takes over from the British, this time with permission
CMF, Nothing’s budget brand, is striking out on its own. The brand is becoming an independent company headquartered in India. The Indian manufacturer Optiemus is acquiring a 51.1 percent majority stake in the company. Nothing will remain a shareholder but will no longer be involved in day-to-day management. What will this mean for owners of the CMF Phone 2 Pro, and why is a British brand selling off its least expensive division?
Nothing founder Carl Pei announced the move himself and left no doubt as to where control would lie.
CMF will become an independent company, majority-owned by Indian shareholders and based in India.
The brand will have its own team and development department and, according to Pei, will bring with it Nothing OS, the engineers, supplier relationships, and the brand organization. Nothing will remain a shareholder and partner but will no longer be at the helm. Until now, CMF was a sub-brand managed from London; the CMF Phone 1 was already being manufactured in India.
From Sub-brand to Indian Company with Enormous Ambition
The new owner is Optiemus Infracom, an Indian electronics manufacturer that has been assembling Nothing and CMF phones in India since last year. At the time, Nothing and Optiemus announced a joint investment of over $100 million over three years; that partnership is now being transformed into a company where design, development, and production are all under one roof. The ambition is far from modest: 100 million phones per year. By comparison: Nothing as a whole sold over 7 million devices in 2024, including earbuds and watches. Pei points to the Indian market of more than 150 million phones per year, where CMF is performing well. That is where the focus lies, not in Europe.
What does this mean for CMF owners?
Owners of a CMF phone face an uncertain future, as Nothing has said nothing about the consequences of the split. The CMF Phone 2 Pro was sold in the Netherlands through the Nothing webshop starting at €249, with the promise of three Android version updates. That promise was made by Nothing, but according to Pei, the software and technical staff are moving over to the new CMF. Who will provide updates for existing devices in the future, and whether the update schedule will remain the same, has not yet been confirmed. You don’t need to worry as much about the warranty in the Netherlands: your rights lie with the seller, and that remains the Nothing webshop if you purchased there.
For future devices, the outlook is bleaker. The CMF Phone 3 Pro won’t be released this year: co-founder Akis Evangelidis previously reported that rising memory prices make it impossible to “build a phone that feels like a real step forward at a price that fits CMF.” Moreover, a brand that focuses entirely on India has little reason to certify a device for the European market. We wouldn’t count on the next CMF phone being released in the Netherlands. Anyone looking for a device around €250 with guaranteed updates would be better off checking out recent Samsung Galaxy A models such as the Galaxy A18: Samsung promises six years of Android updates for those models.
Is Nothing in trouble?
It’s a fair question to ask. Even if Nothing OS remains exclusively with Nothing, the company is still handing over the keys to its car to someone else. Nothing OS isn’t just any software: it’s the translation of the phones’ transparent design onto the screen—the feature that most distinguishes Nothing from the rest. According to Pei, that very feature is being transferred to a company over which Nothing no longer has control—and one that, moreover, aims to become many times larger than Nothing itself. Whoever lends out the keys no longer decides where the car is going. A company that does so voluntarily rarely does it out of luxury.
However, there is no hard evidence of financial distress. In September 2025, Nothing raised another $200 million at a valuation of $1.3 billion, and this spring reported more than $2 billion in revenue since its founding. The company has never published profit figures, and that in itself is telling. What is certain: budget phones are the segment hardest hit by the high cost of memory chips; the CMF Phone 3 Pro was scrapped for that reason, and it is precisely that division that Nothing is now handing over to a partner who is investing its own money in it. Nothing itself is shifting toward higher-end devices and AI-powered gadgets. There is no evidence of a fire sale, but there is a company that is mitigating its risks and handing over its most important asset. The next annual financial results—if they ever come—will tell the rest of the story.
Pei is intimately familiar with this scenario. OnePlus, the brand he co-founded, has stopped releasing new phones in Europe and North America since this summer, is focusing entirely on India outside of China, and is seeing its own OxygenOS merge into ColorOS from parent company Oppo. That is the path he is now having CMF follow.
That leaves the historical allusion. A British company granting its Indian branch independence while remaining a shareholder itself: India is familiar with that story, and the last time it happened, the parting of ways was not without friction. Whether CMF will still need Nothing in the future—or whether Nothing will need CMF—will become clear in the coming years.
