OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei’s new startup wants to launch smartphone in the U.S. to take on Apple
The Nothing Phone (1).
Nothing
U.K.-based consumer tech company Nothing is setting its sights on the U.S., with ambitions of taking on Apple’s iPhone.
The startup, the hardware venture of Carl Pei — co-founder of Chinese mobile phone maker OnePlus — is in early conversations with American carriers about launching a new smartphone in the U.S., Pei told CNBC, without naming any of the carriers.
In July, Nothing launched Phone (1), a mid-range device with a design, price and specs similar to Apple’s entry-level iPhone SE.
The company, which is backed by iPod creator Tony Fadell and Alphabet’s VC arm GV, has only launched its smartphone in Europe, the Middle East and Asia so far — not the U.S. or Canada.
“The reason why we didn’t launch in the U.S. is because you need a lot of additional technical support, to support all the carriers and their unique customizations that they need to make on top of Android,” Pei explained in an interview with CNBC. “We felt that we weren’t ready before.”
“Now we are in discussions with some carriers in the U.S. to potentially launch a future product there,” said the Chinese-Swedish entrepreneur.
The likes of Apple and Samsung already have established relationships with large U.S. carriers, making it harder for smaller firms to compete.
But a third of the sales of its recently launched Ear (stick) headphones currently come from the U.S., Pei added.
“It’s definitely a market where there’s already a lot of interest for our products. And if we launch our smartphones there, I’m sure we could obtain significant growth,” he said.
The company expects its revenues to jump more than tenfold in 2022 — from about $20 million in 2021 to an estimated $250 million this year, according to figures shared with CNBC exclusively. It has also more than doubled its employees to more than 400. However, the firm is still losing money.
“The goal is to be profitable in 2024,” Pei said. “We are not profitable right now. And this year was made even harder due to the foreign currency exchange. We pay a lot of our COGS [cost of goods sold] in USD but we make money in pounds, in euros, in Indian rupees — so everything devalued against the USD.”
The U.S. dollar has rallied this year; the dollar index — which measures the greenback against a basket of major currencies — is up over 8.5% year-to-date.
Taking on Apple
Pei wants to challenge Apple’s iPhone in the U.S. But it’s a steep hill to climb.
“There’s a challenge with Android where iOS is just becoming more and more dominant. They have very strong lock-in with iMessage, with AirDrop, especially among Gen Z. So that’s a rising concern for me,” he said.
“There might be a time where Apple is like 80% of the overall market and that just does not leave enough space for Android-based manufacturers to keep playing,” he said.
Apple’s active installed base, which takes into account people who bought phones second-hand, surpassed 50% in the U.S. in the second quarter, surpassing Android, according to data from Counterpoint Research.
Apple was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.
Pei says he sympathized with Elon Musk, who as Twitter’s new CEO has put pressure on Apple over its App Store restrictions and 30% fee imposed on in-app purchases.
He added that, in a couple of years’ time, Nothing may have to “have a serious think about this problem and how we tackle it.”
“It’s going to create a ceiling to our growth,” Pei said.
David vs. Goliath
Pei said his firm has faced a plethora of challenges in bringing its products to market. One of the major setbacks it faced was when it approached Foxconn, Apple’s largest iPhone supplier, to manufacture its phones.
According to Pei, Foxconn refused to do business with Nothing, citing past failures in the smartphone industry.
“Every startup manufacturer has worked with Foxconn,” Pei said. “But when it was our turn, they said no because every startup that worked with them failed. And every time a startup failed, Foxconn lost money on it, they were not able to recoup their costs.”
Foxconn was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.
Covid restrictions around the globe also presented a significant hurdle for the company. In India, where Nothing produces its phones, the company was unable to fly out engineers due to travel restrictions, with Pei saying the company had to manage its factory on the ground remotely.
“We really had to hustle to create this,” he said of Nothing’s smartphone.
In Shenzhen, China, where officials have imposed strict lockdowns, Nothing’s engineers had to discuss component designs and mechanics during mandated 45-minute periods when it was acceptable for people to go outside to buy groceries.
Nothing has sold over 1 million products to date globally, with its Ear (1) and Ear (stick) earbuds selling 600,000 units and the Phone (1) reaching 500,000 shipments.
Still, the startup is a tiny player, and it faces a bleak economic outlook where people are being forced to limit their spending drastically.
In Europe, smartphone shipments sank 16% in the third quarter year-over-year, per Counterpoint Research data — although they were up slightly from the previous quarter on the back of the iPhone 14’s strong launch.
Samsung is Europe’s largest smartphone maker with 35% market share, followed by China’s Xiaomi’s 23% and Apple’s 21%.
Technology
Google CEO Pichai says company will ‘sort it out’ if OpenAI misused YouTube for AI training
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai speaks at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation CEO Summit in San Francisco on Nov. 16, 2023.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Google will “sort it out” if it determines Microsoft-backed OpenAI relied on YouTube content to train an artificial intelligence model that can generate videos.
The comments, in an interview Tuesday with CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa, come after OpenAI technology chief Mira Murati told the Wall Street Journal in March that she wasn’t sure if YouTube videos were part of the training data for the company’s Sora model introduced earlier in the year.
Murati said OpenAI had drawn on publicly available data and on licensed data. The New York Times later reported that OpenAI had transcribed over a million hours of YouTube videos.
Asked if Google would sue OpenAI if the startup violated the search company’s terms of service, Pichai didn’t offer specifics.
“Look, I think it’s a question for them to answer,” Pichai said. “I don’t have anything to add. We do have clear terms of service. And so, you know, I think normally in these things we engage with companies and make sure they understand our terms of service. And we’ll sort it out.”
Pichai said Google has processes in place to figure out if OpenAI failed to comply with the rules. Newspapers such as The New York Times have already taken aim at OpenAI for allegedly breaking copyright law and training models on their articles.
Pichai’s interview followed a keynote to developers at Google’s I/O conference, where executives announced new AI models, including one called Veo that can compose synthetic videos. Those looking to get early access will have to receive approval from Google.
OpenAI preempted the Google event on Monday. The company revealed an AI model called GPT-4o and showed how users of its ChatGPT mobile app would be able to hold realistic voice conversations, interrupting the AI assistant and having it analyze what appears in front of a smartphone camera. On Tuesday, Google showed off similar upcoming capabilities.
“I don’t think they’ve shipped their demo to their users yet,” Pichai said of OpenAI. “I don’t think it’s available in the product.”
OpenAI said in a blog post on Monday that customers of its ChatGPT Plus subscriptions will be able to try an early version of the new voice mode in the weeks ahead. Pichai said Google’s Project Astra multimedia chat capabilities will come to its Gemini chatbot later this year.
“We have a clear sense of how to approach it, and we’ll get it right,” Pichai said.
Google has reduced the cost of serving up AI models in web searches by 80% since showing off a preview last year, relying on its custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and Nvidia’s popular graphics processing units, he said. Google said during the keynote that it’s starting to display its AI Overviews in search results for all users in the U.S.
In June, Apple will hold its Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California. Bloomberg reported in March that Apple was discussing the idea of adding Gemini to the iPhone. Pichai told Bosa that Google has enjoyed “a great partnership with Apple over the years.” A Google expert witness said in court last November that the company gives Apple 36% of its search advertising revenue from the Safari browser.
“We have focused on delivering great experiences for the Apple ecosystem,” Pichai said. “It is something we take very seriously and I’m confident — we have many ways to make sure our products are accessible. We see that today, AI Overviews have been a popular feature on iOS when we have tested, and so we’ll continue — including Gemini. We’ll continue working to bring that there.”
WATCH: Alphabet CEO on report OpenAI trained GPT-4 on YouTube: We have clear terms of service
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