Nothing CEO Carl Pei believes India is approaching a turning point in consumer technology: After becoming a major manufacturing base for smartphones, the country now has an opportunity to build the engineering capabilities and global brands behind the products. His comments come at a significant moment, with the government stepping up its push for domestic electronics value addition and Indian technology companies, startups and global tech leaders increasingly focusing on building capabilities in the country.
In a lengthy post on X titled ‘India Is Inevitable’, Pei said Japan, South Korea and China had followed a similar path – large-scale electronics manufacturing eventually gave rise to globally recognised consumer technology companies.
“India is next,” he wrote.
But Pei’s argument is not simply that India has a huge smartphone market. He says the next phase has to be about R&D, product engineering and intellectual property.
Why Is Carl Pei Saying This Now?
There is a commercial reason behind Pei’s India optimism. Nothing announced in September 2025 that its CMF sub-brand would become an independent subsidiary, with India serving as its base for operations, R&D and manufacturing. Nothing and Indian electronics manufacturer Optiemus also announced a joint venture involving an investment of more than $100 million over three years and plans to create more than 1,800 jobs.
Carl Pei had described the ambition at the time as building CMF into a global consumer technology brand from India. His latest post takes that earlier business decision and puts it into a much larger industrial narrative.
The entrepreneur argues that CMF can be more than a brand selling phones in India, and can become an Indian-based company that develops products and engineering capabilities for global markets.
India Has Already Done The Manufacturing Part
The government has spent the past decade trying to establish India as a major electronics manufacturing hub through initiatives including Make in India and Production Linked Incentive schemes.
The results have been significant. The Centre said in August that it had notified a Rs 62,500-crore mobile phone manufacturing scheme, aimed at increasing scale, deepening domestic value addition and strengthening the mobile manufacturing supply chain.
Importantly, the scheme is not limited to assembly. The government says it will support Indian mobile brands, encourage Indian patents and promote design and R&D.
The Electronics Component Manufacturing Scheme is also designed to develop deeper parts of the supply chain, covering areas such as camera-module and display-module sub-assemblies, printed circuit boards, passive components and other electronics components.
That is broadly the gap Pei is talking about.
From ‘Made In India’ To ‘Engineered In India’
Pei argues that manufacturing alone does not create a globally competitive technology company.
He defines “real R&D” as the ability to control decisions around a product’s structure, materials, thermal performance, cameras, software, antennas and key components – and to work directly with suppliers to develop technologies rather than simply choosing from an existing catalogue.
His criticism is partly rooted in India’s earlier smartphone experience.
Around 2015, Indian brands held a significant share of the domestic smartphone market. But as Chinese and other international manufacturers entered with increasingly sophisticated products, many Indian brands struggled to keep pace.
Pei’s explanation is that several domestic companies had relied heavily on off-the-shelf designs and manufacturing partners rather than developing comparable engineering capabilities themselves.
He also offers a lesson: Manufacturing can create scale, but R&D creates the ability to keep improving the product.
Before Carl Pei, It Was Jensen Huang
Pei is not the only major technology executive talking about India’s transition from technology consumer to technology creator. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently highlighted a similar opportunity in a different field: Artificial intelligence.
In comments made earlier this month, Huang said India’s established IT industry provides a strong foundation for a new technology platform. He said he was excited to see Indian companies and startups begin using AI, contributing to the technology and building a local AI economy. He also told governments that “AI is moving fast”, so countries need to move faster.
Huang has made similar arguments before, including advocating that India develop its own AI capabilities rather than simply export talent and import technology.
The sectors are different, but the underlying idea is similar: India’s advantage cannot remain limited to being a large market or a source of skilled labour. The bigger opportunity is to build technology, companies and intellectual property inside the country.
Pei’s China Lesson
Pei, a Swede, moved to Shenzhen in 2012 to build phones and spent eight years there. He says China’s electronics ecosystem strengthened when domestic smartphone companies began demanding increasingly sophisticated components from local suppliers.
Those demands forced suppliers to improve. Better suppliers then created better products, which generated more demand and further investment.
Pei believes India could develop a similar cycle.
India already has the huge market, manufacturing capacity and engineering talent. According to Pei, what’s missing is a sufficiently large Indian-origin global consumer technology brand capable of putting pressure on the supply chain to innovate.
