Nothing has been in business for about six years now, five if you count only the smartphone division. Yet, for some reason, it feels like a lifetime since the company became operational. Co-founder and Chief Executive Carl Pei has repeatedly reiterated the company's motto of making tech fun again, and by now, most of us have got used to hearing it. The question that arises in the current circumstances is: how does one make tech fun when it also happens to be expensive?
For context, the company reported 577 per cent year-on-year growth in 2024, as per Counterpoint data. It also emerged as the fastest-growing brand in India's smartphone market, driven by demand for the Phone 2a series and its sub-brand, CMF. In 2025, Nothing reported having surpassed USD 1 billion in lifetime revenue in just four years, with more than half of that coming in 2024 alone.
With the new Phone 4b out, Akis Evangelidis, Co-founder and India President, sat down with BW Businessworld to talk about the rationale behind the name 4b, the wild marketing bet that paid off with Royal Challengers Bangalore, Nothing's roadmap for future products, and much more. Notably, just a year after Evangelidis took charge of Nothing India, the brand went on to become 2025's fastest-growing smartphone company in the country.
It is worth noting that the company's top-tier phone this year is the Phone 4a Pro, an upper mid-range device, rather than an outright flagship. Pei has already made it clear that Nothing will not build a flagship this year, a strategy that appears to be working in the brand's favour. Freed from the pressure and weight of expectation that comes with a flagship launch, the company has been able to pour its energy into doubling down on its forte: making good mid-range phones. The Phone 4a series is exhibit A. The Phone 4b is exhibit B.
On 14 July, the Phone 4b finished its opening day on Flipkart as the platform's best-selling smartphone above Rs 30,000, setting a new opening-day record for the London-based company in the process. The base model carries an MRP of Rs 34,999, which comes down to Rs 29,999 after bank discounts and exchange offers.
All this while the Indian smartphone industry is going through its weakest phase in six years. Yet Counterpoint noted in April that Nothing, along with CMF, led the market with 47 per cent year-on-year growth in the first quarter of 2026.
We met for this conversation somewhere Nothing had never organised an event before, at altitude, with Khardung La not far off.
"It's been a quirky journey, I have to say," Evangelidis says, starting off the conversation on exactly the right note.
Building Proof Points, One Product at a Time
Evangelidis is candid about how unlikely Nothing's existence once seemed. "We started this journey because end users weren't satisfied with what the industry had to offer," he says. "A lot of people thought we were crazy even thinking about starting this business. Every new player that had tried had failed. But we were entering our thirties, we had a lot of energy still, and we thought, yeah, it would be good to take a shot."
What followed was a deliberately staged strategy. "First it was about entering and starting the business and leveraging this to have a strong proof point," he explains. The Ear 1 launch, "which sold over half a million units," gave the company room to develop its first phone. "Phone one was a crazy buzz; it took over the Internet", he added.
Phone 2 doubled down on that momentum. But the real inflexion point, he says, was proving Nothing could scale. "Scale is extremely important in our industry. Ever since we did that with the 2a series, we've been the fastest-growing brand pretty much across every single quarter. Over the last nine quarters, eight of the last nine, we've been the fastest-growing brand", Evangelidis added.
The scaling story has kept building from there, from signing Ranveer Singh as the brand's first ambassador to getting the Nothing name on the Royal Challengers Bangalore kit last year, "all the way down to this year where we got the title sponsor for RCB, as well as recently opened our first flagship store in Bangalore, which is doing insanely well."
That store, open for less than four months at the time of this conversation, has, in his words, "already crossed like USD 2 million in gross revenue. We were extremely pleased with that, and definitely looking to expand our stores in the coming years quite aggressively as well, all across India," he added.
The RCB Bet
We all saw the Charlie XCX collaboration recently. Turns out it was more than just a campaign. Nothing onboarded the English celebrity as its chief Brand Officer as well. On the India front, the RCB sponsorship made the headlines. Evangelidis states it was never a random decision.
"We call a few of those strategic bets, because after a new brand and so on, it's still a decent kind of budget size, and we cannot just afford to do things kind of randomly." He draws a comparison to European football, where fandom tends to stay intensely local.
"When we started working with RCB the previous year, when they won the first IPL, you could see the level of love around the brand, and also the coolness. I think those guys keep it very cool as well. So it felt like just a natural match in a way." When the opportunity to become title sponsor came up, "it felt like a no-brainer. We didn't think about it, because again, those are kind of very strategic moves", he added.
The bet paid off, "with them winning twice in a row, and hopefully, why not three times in a row next year, and doing something historical that never happened in the IPL."
On the marketing budget itself, he will not put a number to it. "I won't disclose, but I will tell you it's a lot lower than pretty much all the competitors." That constraint goes back to the company's earliest days. "We started this company, and we had literally zero marketing budget for the first two and a half years. So it has always been about being very smart, and also selling the product in a way, trying to innovate and be extremely strategic in terms of what we do, and more importantly, what we don't."
Elephant In The Room: Staying An Enthusiast Brand While Scaling
There is a theory, put to Evangelidis directly in the conversation, that enthusiast brands eventually drift away from the very details that made early adopters fall for them, as the pressure to scale takes over. He does not accept the framing. "A hundred per cent," he says of retaining that enthusiast identity. "I think being an enthusiast brand, especially towards early adopters, is critical, and will always be. If we walk away from this, then things will get bad quite rapidly. Ourselves, we see ourselves as tech enthusiasts, so it's very important to satisfy our inner self in a way."
I brought up my own experience with the Phone 2 as an example, the way the display would fade out to meet the power button on sleep. While waking up, it would do so from the exact point of the touch on the display. "Means a lot that you say this", Evangelidis said. He argues those details are the whole point. "For us, details have been everything when it comes to design. People wouldn't be able to pinpoint why, but all those details eventually add up to each other."
He points to the Phone 4a Pro as proof the design language has evolved without losing what makes it recognisably Nothing. "If you show it to anyone, people will say it's a Nothing product. But it has evolved. Every time they experience a Nothing product, we want people to carry that years down the line and keep that excitement."
I also told him about my own Phone 2 surviving a motorcycle fall at roughly 60 to 70 kilometres an hour, its glass back cracking along with a minor dent on the screen, but the phone continuing to work to date without a single issue.
4b: The Logic Behind The Name
What does the ‘b’ stand for? Budget, perhaps?
The rationale for the new line, he explains, comes down to widening the product portfolio gradually. "It's been three years now. We've been riding on the ‘a’ series, again, an almost unbelievably successful product line. I was, to be honest, surprised we would have sold a lot more. With the price jump and everything, we thought we would actually do less than the 3A series. We're actually going to do more", he added.
That success set up the next step. "We decided just to keep it as a new series that, eventually, in the future, maybe two phones will come through our series. Overall, kind of segment it in a very clear way for the user, so that they don't need to think about multiple products within one series." On the naming logic itself: "As you go down with letters, you count down the segment, and then each number signifies the generation we're in."
Nothing's flagship products, by contrast, continue on a longer cycle. "We keep, at least for now, a two-year upgrade cycle, to ensure a flagship product is really well thought through, not rushed, not declared by the industry, but by our own, and what we want the sort of flagship Nothing experience to be."
On a separate note, the Nothing Phone 4b's arrival lands almost poetically alongside the Phone 1 receiving its final software update. "That wasn't planned, by the way," Evangelidis says.
The RAMpocalypse: Living With The New Normal
Rising memory and component costs form the backdrop to all of this, and Evangelidis does not expect prices to fall back to where they were any time soon. "They won't, for at least until the second half of next year," he says. Asked whether prices will ever return to older levels, he adds, "Maybe in three years' time, two, three years' time, but it will take time. To be honest, I think this is a new normal."
What has struck him is how quickly buyers have adjusted. "Phones that would launch under Rs 20,000 last year now are launching over Rs 30,000, like a similar kind of configuration, yet people are still buying." Brands built entirely around value for money are finding the transition harder, he says, "but for us, even if you look at it, the 4a series was a big jump compared to the 3a series, yet it's selling better”, he added.
Even Apple and Samsung's usual pricing leverage has not held this time round, in his view. "Not this time around, not this time around”, he stated when I mentioned Apple and Samsung being able to bully their vendors. “This is why you've seen Apple as well has increased the price as well."
Nothing's own position, he argues, has always been shaped by a cost disadvantage relative to bigger rivals. "We don't have the economies of scale the biggest players have. We don't have the marketing budget that the biggest player has. So it has always been about this kind of user experience, how can we offer something differentiated."
The underlying principle hasn't moved. "Ever since day one, we pronounce ourselves not ship junk. So every product, given the price constraints, memories, economies of scale and so on, that's an extra element to the equation, but the equation is pretty much the same."
Since the 4a series launched, Nothing has already gone through two price revisions, and the top Pro variant (12GB + 256GB) now sits at Rs 55,999. Demand does not appear to have slowed. "On the launch day, you've seen on the store there were hundreds of people lining up to buy the 4A Pro."
Market Share As An Output, Not A Target
Asked directly about Nothing's market share ambitions in India, Evangelidis pushes back gently on the framing. "For me, market share is more of an output. For us, we've just been focusing on the inputs. I won't give you a specific number, and to be honest, even internally, we don't operate like this. We look at volumes, how do we scale, how do we extend our product portfolio, which product categories can we enter more."
The evidence of that ambition, he argues, is visible everywhere else, in the RCB sponsorship, the flagship store, and plans for further expansion. "If things sustain with that level of growth, I think, rapidly, within the next three to five years, we would definitely be a leading brand here in India."
What Comes After Phones?
Evangelidis grows visibly animated discussing what he calls a coming AI era. "There will be a whole new kind of product ecosystem made of AI hardware products. One of them is going to come before the end of the year. That's going to be a new category."
He frames the shift in sweeping terms: "It is a bit like when the Internet came, or the first smartphone was launched with this kind of app store, and a lot of cards got reshuffled in the way. Now we have a seat at the table, and I think the cards are going to be reshuffled."
That seat, he says, took time to earn. "It took us five to six years to build a sizable business that can ship millions of products with full end-to-end product capabilities."
Why Community Still Matters
Asked to rate the importance of a community-driven approach on a scale of one to five, Evangelidis does not hesitate. "Five. For us, because two things, I think. First, it keeps you grounded and close to the user." He describes running a community investment round in the company's early days specifically so supporters would have a genuine stake in the outcome, "so people could invest and have skin in the game, not just being there cheering the brand on the sideline, but actually have skin in the game, and potentially have that financial upside down the line."
Since then, the community has elected a board observer every year, someone who sits in on Nothing's board meetings, all of which take place in London. "It's so important to have someone that sits in our board meetings and spends half an hour following all the feedback, what's working, not working. It continuously keeps us in check when it comes to the user."
With AI-led products and features now shipping faster than ever, he sees that feedback loop as only becoming more important. "Not even before it was months, now it became days, now it became pretty much hours. It's crazy, the level of all the new features drop."
For a brand that has staked its identity on being different, the answer to keeping tech fun while everything around it gets more expensive seems to rest on the same instinct that got Nothing here in the first place: place a few calculated bets, keep the community close, and let the scale follow rather than lead.
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