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Exclusive | The Nothing Phone 1 is Carl Pei’s first move in trying to shake up the smartphone since leaving OnePlus. Will it work?

  • Two years after leaving OnePlus, Carl Pei is betting his new company’s Nothing Phone 1 can shake up the market again with a flashy design
  • Nothing has big plans for an ecosystem with its smartphone at the centre, but it must prove the market wants its products before disrupting it

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Nothing founder Carl Pei at his office in London, where he moved after leaving Shenzhen-based OnePlus two years ago. Photo: Nothing
Matt Haldane

Two years after Carl Pei left OnePlus, the buzzy smartphone brand he co-founded with Pete Lau in Shenzhen in 2013, the entrepreneur is set to launch a new smartphone with his new company Nothing, all from a new location.

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“London is a great location because there’s so much talent here, especially in the financial services sector,” Pei said in a video call with the South China Morning Post on June 29. “I mean, we need funding also to grow this company when it comes to design talent, marketing talent, branding talent.”

As Pei prepares to launch the Nothing Phone 1 – stylised as “phone (1)” – much of what he has to say about his new company is focused on the practical reality of building a start-up. It takes a lot of money and time to build a company into something that can capture the public’s imagination, especially in an industry as competitive as smartphones.
The Nothing Phone 1 uses a transparent back, in line with design language used with the Ear 1 wireless earbuds, the company’s first product released last year. Photo: Nothing
The Nothing Phone 1 uses a transparent back, in line with design language used with the Ear 1 wireless earbuds, the company’s first product released last year. Photo: Nothing

With the Phone 1, which launches on July 12, Pei is operating in a drastically different landscape than what existed in the market when the OnePlus One launched in 2014. At that time, the smartphone market was still growing quickly. The Android ecosystem was also highly fragmented and playing catch-up with the iPhone. OnePlus took advantage of this with slick marketing promising to “never settle”, undercutting the competition drastically on price for high-end hardware.

Today, Pei is once again launching a phone from an unproven brand, but there is less to disrupt. There are many good Android phones to choose from, and the software experience is more similar than ever thanks to Google’s efforts to streamline the experience across devices. Moreover, 15 years after the launch of the first iPhone, the smartphone market is saturated and in decline. Smartphone shipments were down 10 per cent year on year in May to 96 million units, according to Counterpoint Research.

Does any of this concern Pei? Not by his telling.

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“I know why the market is shrinking: because there’s no reason for consumers to buy the product,” Pei said, blaming fewer changes and less innovation between smartphone models.

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