Nothing is the unsung hero of the mobile industry. But for how long?

When OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei departed the company he helped create and turn into a global success story to start an entirely new venture called “Nothing” (of all things), I have to admit… I didn’t know what to think. But while the name of the UK-based consumer electronics outfit continues to baffle me (and occasionally make my work unnecessarily difficult), there’s no denying Pei’s crazy gamble seems to be paying off rather handsomely.

What’s hiding under Nothing’s big numbers?

You don’t have to be a math whiz to understand that it’s (theoretically) much easier to multiply one apple by seven than a million or ten million apples. In other words, you can’t expect Apple (the company) or Samsung to boost their quarterly smartphone shipments by close to 700 percent… unless we discover life on another planet, and said planet decides to embrace Earth’s iPhones en masse.

That being said, there are plenty of smartphone vendors (both new and old) that could theoretically improve their sales scores by 693 percent, but are instead struggling to find growth of 69.3 or even 6.93 percent. I’m looking at you, Sony. And you, Asus. And Huawei, and Realme, and even Google and Motorola.

That makes Nothing’s Q2 2024 progress compared to the same period of last year a pretty incredible achievement regardless of what the company’s Q2 2023 starting point was.

It may not sound like it, but that 246 percent year-on-year growth estimated for the first half of 2024 is perhaps even more remarkable, suggesting a longer-term trend that Nothing could well sustain going forward. For how long? That, my friends and dear readers, is the million or maybe billion-dollar question, and it depends on way too many variables to discuss in a single article.

The sky is the limit for Nothing’s growth. Or is it?

Looking at the Q2 2024 smartphone market report where Nothing doesn’t rank in the top five global vendors, one can easily notice there’s practically nothing new under the sun (darn it, another “nothing” pun). That suggests breaking into the industry’s major league is no easy feat, which in turn means Nothing’s progress will probably slow down sooner rather than later.

OnePlus just so happens to be the perfect example of a brand that grew and grew and grew until hitting an invisible ceiling of sorts and a stagnation point that’s starting to seem impossible to escape from. Because following his old company’s path up to that point feels like an extremely risky endeavor, Carl Pei may want to make sure early on that Nothing won’t repeat the OnePlus mistakes of the last few years.

What I like about Nothing is that its products still carry a unique and distinctive identity, which… may not be possible for long. The company will inevitably have to adopt more conventional designs as its sales volumes continue to grow, and at that moment, we’ll probably find out exactly what Carl Pei‘s long-term intentions for this brand are.

In my view, there are two paths Nothing could take after another one or two quarters of “organic” growth. The OnePlus path, in which short-term growth stifles brand identity with potentially catastrophic effects in the long run, and a road so very few companies are bold enough to choose, where Nothing continues to manufacture unique (but hard-to-scale) products, putting its original values and principles above profits.