September 24, 2025. Thirteen days after the Series C announcement, CMF by Nothing has announced its own standalone corporate structure. CMF is establishing an independent headquarters in India and entering into a joint manufacturing venture with Optiemus Electronics, one of India’s largest contract electronics manufacturers, with a $100 million investment commitment and a target of manufacturing 5 million units annually in India within three years.
This is a significant structural move, and the timing alongside the Series C is deliberate. CMF is not being spun out from Nothing: it is being given its own operational infrastructure to serve the Indian and Southeast Asian markets at the scale those markets require. At the parent brand level, nothing can focus on premium global products. CMF, with its own India HQ and manufacturing JV, can compete on volume and price with Xiaomi and Realme in the markets where volume and price are what win.
Why the Optiemus partnership matters
Optiemus has manufacturing relationships with Motorola and Nokia in India. Bringing CMF into that manufacturing ecosystem means CMF has the same supply chain advantages that the established volume players use to compete at ₹15,000-25,000. The 5-million-unit annual target within three years is ambitious. CMF Phone 1 sold 100,000 units in three hours in July 2024. If the second and third CMF phones maintain that demand trajectory, 5 million annual units is reachable, but it requires a manufacturing infrastructure that CMF does not currently have. The Optiemus JV is the first piece of that infrastructure going into place.
The India-first strategy is taking shape
Nothing has been building an India-first strategy since the launch of the Phone (2a) in March 2024. CMF’s India HQ and the Optiemus JV are the manufacturing foundation of that strategy. The Bengaluru flagship store announced with the Series C is the retail foundation. Together, they describe a company that is treating India not as an export market but as a domestic one: manufacturing locally, selling locally, building a community locally, and using that Indian base as the growth engine for the next phase of expansion.
The risk in running two simultaneous corporate structures is coherence. CMF needs to remain recognizably Nothing’s sub-brand even as it operates independently. The design language, the software philosophy, and the upgrade path to the mainline Nothing products all need to hold together. Today’s announcement gives CMF the manufacturing and organizational independence it needs to compete at scale. Whether it maintains the identity coherence needed to be valuable as a Nothing sub-brand, rather than just another Indian budget phone brand, is the question that the next 18 months will answer.
Part of Nothing Company: The Complete Story, my running diary of Nothing from founding to global expansion.
Related reading: how Xiaomi built the India-first manufacturing model CMF is chasing.