‘Foolish’ Enough to Try: Inside Nothing’s Battle for India’s Smartphone Market

“You’ve got to be foolish to begin with.” Akis Evangelidis says it with a faint smile.

He is dressed entirely in black: T-shirt, sleeveless vest, pleated trousers, and polished shoes. No logo. No colour. A black watch hugs his wrist. His hair is clipped close, thinning at the temples. The beard is trimmed with care. He stands still when he speaks, almost economical in movement.

Behind him, dark wooden panels swallow the light. A switched-off television throws back a dim reflection of the room.

On the desk nearby, three transparent smartphones lie aligned beside two open laptops. Headphones coil next to charging cables. A notebook carries rushed handwriting. Two glasses sit apart — one drained, one untouched. It looks less like a hotel suite and more like a temporary command post.

“You’ve got to be foolish to begin with,” Evangelidis underlined again. “It’s an extremely hard industry.”

Back in January 2021, when Nothing was announced, it didn’t look foolish. It looked like a company catching a tailwind.

Just months earlier, Evangelidis had helped launch OnePlus Nord — one of Amazon India’s biggest smartphone debuts. The mechanics of hype were fresh: Community, scarcity and velocity. The crowd had shown up on cue. The assumption was simple: step out, build again and scale again.

“Let's dance again, and the same thing will happen,” Evangelidis recalls the emotions ahead of the rollout of Nothing. But soon the reality hit. “You realize that you're fool on your own,” he rues.

Why? Because the cofounders of Nothing underestimated everything, including the scaffolding.

Why Building Nothing’s First Product Was a Supply Chain Nightmare?

At OnePlus, there had been a conglomerate beneath the surface — absorbing shocks, smoothing friction and negotiating supply chains from a position of muscle. At Nothing, there was only a name, a design philosophy and an ambition. “We had to start from scratch,” he recounts.

Then came transparency.

The first product, Ear 1, was built around exposed internals. There was nothing hidden and no cosmetic masking. Which meant the internals were no longer just engineering. They were aesthetic. Magnets had to be custom-made. Glue lines had to be perfect. Tolerances had to be redesigned because every misalignment would be visible to the naked eye.

But factories hesitated.

The math was brutal. Here’s why. When you are shipping tens of millions of units, you can demand custom parts.

But when you are a new brand with no history, you are asking for favours. Suppliers demanded cash upfront, credit wasn’t even a conversation and deferred terms were fiction. Money went out long before a rupee came in.

And that wasn’t the worst of it. Three factories shut down. Imagine, this was for earbuds, which needs a few hundred components. A smartphone, by contrast, carried nearly six thousand.

Result? Timelines slammed into reality. Cash became oxygen. Miss a shipment, and revenue stalled. Stall revenue, and there was no second swing. One slip could end the run.

On launch day for Ear 1, Evangelidis was on a beach in the south of France with his wife and her friends. And yes, he wasn’t swimming. He was refreshing the website. Over 100,000 people queued up to buy. Inventory: 1,000 units. Quality glitches had frozen production. The line had to be restarted, demand was sprinting and supply was still tying its laces.

He ordered champagne anyway. For a moment, it felt like proof. Half a million earbuds would eventually move. Enough to raise the next round, and enough to stay alive.

Nothing’s Real Challenge: Scaling in India’s Brutal Smartphone Market

But survival is not scale.

By July 2022, when Phone 1 finally went on sale, Nothing wasn’t just launching a smartphone. It was arguing for its right to exist in a market that has wiped out every independent entrant for over a decade. Suppliers offered zero trust. Payments were upfront. Delays drew blood. Six thousand components had to land in perfect sequence. The odds were much more than unfriendly. They were hostile.

Nothing cofounders kept building anyway.

Fast forward to 2025. Nothing became India’s fastest-growing smartphone brand. But at 2% market share, growth makes headlines. But it fails to bend the market.

The hierarchy, though, hasn’t budged. Vivo tightened its grip, spreading across price tiers and pressing hard through online and offline. Samsung stayed within striking distance, flexing premium muscle and decades of brand recall. Oppo held the line, backed by an offline network wired deep into India’s retail spine.

Above them sits a different kind of force. India became Apple’s fourth-largest global market in 2025 — behind only the United States, China and Japan. Fourteen million iPhones shipped. Sixteen percent year-on-year growth. The fastest among its top five markets. Apple ranked fifth by volume in India, with a 10% share. By value, it owned 29%. That is the scale of the mountain.

The question is no longer whether Evangelidis and cofounders were foolish to begin. It is whether foolishness survives scale.

A year ago, Evangelidis moved to lead Nothing’s India operations — stepping out of brand-building into a market that runs on volume and velocity.

India is not patient with newcomers. It measures loyalty in discounts. It rewards distribution muscle. It punishes inventory mistakes. A festive quarter can distort a year. A pricing misstep can undo momentum overnight.

And yet, in the past twelve months, Nothing has grown faster than any other smartphone brand in the country. While fastest is a speed metric, biggest is a power metric.

Evangelidis knows the difference. “In this industry,” he says, “if you slow down, you die.”

And nowhere is that truer than in India.

Design, Software and the Fight Against India’s Price Wars

India does not reward hesitation. It rewards discounts. Buyers here compare six, sometimes eight brands before choosing one. Specifications are currency. Twelve gigabytes of RAM. Five thousand milliamp batteries. Fast charging measured in minutes. A festive sale can rewrite a quarter. A deeper discount can erase a rival overnight.

“When people buy a smartphone, they look across six to eight brands,” he says. Consumers, he underscores, are tech savvy. India is engineered for the value-for-money reflex.

Evangelidis has seen what happens when a brand builds equity primarily on price. “The issue,” he says of that strategy, “if it’s the main reason why people are buying your products, it’s only a matter of time that someone else will come in.” The cycle is predictable. Bigger battery. Brighter screen. Lower tag. The advantage resets.

Nothing has chosen a different anchor. When the company studies its Net Promoter Scores, Evangelidis says the main reason customers buy is Nothing OS: Software experience, the interface, the feel and the coherence. “That’s exactly it,” he says when asked what differentiates the brand in a commodified spec market: Design and software.

What about hardware? Simple. Hardware can be replicated. Specifications escalate, price wars compress margins but a distinct operating system — anchored in a design-first philosophy — compounds. “Consistency compounds,” says Evangelidis.

That is the wager.

But wagers require oxygen. And in smartphones, oxygen is volume.

“Our industry is a volume game,” Evangelidis says. “Get volume, more doors open. Partners are happy. They push your products through the supply chain and give better terms. It’s a volume game. If you don’t have volume, don’t even try.”

At 2% market share, oxygen is thin.

That is where CMF enters.

“The reality with CMF,” he says, “same philosophy, just different execution.” The idea was simple: a younger audience, lower disposable income — without abandoning design. “Our whole hypothesis was, okay, we’ve addressed the ₹25,000-plus segment,” he explains. But it doesn’t mean that one is just about to graduate or starting professional journey, she should compromise. Transparency costs money. Custom components cost more. “To pull off transparency, it’s a lot of incremental costs,” he says.

CMF removes some of that strain while preserving the ethos. Scale, for Evangelidis, is not a quarterly spike. “It has to be sustained,” he says. “It’s not a one-off.” The gamble is that CMF feeds volume, volume feeds leverage, leverage feeds better Nothing products — and the flywheel tightens. If it doesn’t, the math returns. And the math, as he learned early, is brutal.

Globally, Nothing is still small. Roughly 1% market share.

Apple and Samsung operate at industrial scale. They can afford long experiments. They can test new form factors. They can absorb failed bets. They can deploy budgets that dwarf annual revenues of challengers.

“They can spend a lot of time and money trying new things,” Evangelidis says. “They can waste money in a way.”

Scale is their strength. But it’s also their constraint. “They won’t be able to change drastically what they’re doing,” he argues.

Can AI Help Nothing Break India’s Smartphone Hierarchy?

There are huge business implications. Ecosystems bind them, app stores generate billions and services revenue protects the model. Another reality? Installed bases demand continuity. Radical shifts are expensive when you dominate.

Nothing, in contrast, does not dominate. At 1%, it has no legacy to defend.

“We are still niche at the moment,” says Evangelidis. “We can take those risks.”

Yet in India, the early signals are encouraging.

Nothing has emerged as the fastest-growing brand. Shipments jumped 32% year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2025, helped by an expanding offline retail presence. “Its clean UI, reliable connectivity and distinctive design remain key differentiators,” noted Counterpoint Research in its quarterly smartphone market report.

None of this, though, makes the climb easier.

Smartphones, as Evangelidis readily admits, remain a volume game. And the incumbents still operate at a very different scale. In the latest quarter, Vivo led India’s smartphone market with a 24% share, powered by its Y-series models and deep offline distributor network. Oppo followed at 15%, with Samsung at 13%, while Apple and Xiaomi were tied at 12% each.

“Going from buzz to meaningful volumes will be the real test,” says Tarun Pathak, research director at Counterpoint. The brand has the ingredients to win. What it still lacks is scale.

So, can it cross that gap? Can he win the battle?

Evangelidis believes the next battle will not be fought on megapixels or charging speeds. It will be fought inside the operating system.

The shift, he argues, will be AI-led: more contextual, more personalised, less static. “If the whole OS becomes highly personalised,” he says, “a lot of things are about to change.”

That is where he sees an opening. The incumbents move carefully because they must. A 2% player can move quickly because it has to. “Scale is their strength,” he says. “And our weakness.”

Evangelidis, however, does not romanticise the imbalance.

With scale comes supplier leverage, better component pricing, wider retail reach, larger marketing budgets and protection during downturns. Without it, every cycle is existential. “In this business,” he says, “you either go big, or that’s it.”

India is where that ascent is being attempted.

The country is Apple’s fastest-growing major market. Vivo and Samsung are entrenched. Offline distribution is deep, disciplined and territorial. Discounts can distort perception overnight.

Nothing is climbing into that terrain with 2% share and design as its wedge.

The margin for error is thin. Evangelidis knows it. “There is no stopping anytime soon,” he says. “If we were to slow down, we would eventually die.”

This brings the story back to where it began: foolishness. “You’ve got to be foolish to begin with,” Evangelidis said.

The harder question now: Is foolish enough to finish?