A report surfaced last week claiming that Nothing would be exiting “12 or more” global markets, following in the footsteps of OnePlus, the previous brand co-founded by Nothing co-founder Carl Pei.
Meanwhile, Nothing co-founder Akis Evangelidis has denied the claims in the above report, calling it “fake news.” He says the company is reorganizing its teams, launching dedicated business units and “consolidating individual countries into regional hubs to operate more efficiently” in preparation for its next phase of growth.
Evangelidis acknowledges that the changes “have affected some situations”, but says “the numbers reported are much higher”. The report in question claims that Nothing is laying off 40% of its workforce, specifically laying off 50% of its R&D teams in China and 30-40% in London.
Nothing Phone (4A) Pro
The report also claimed that the Nothing Phone (4B) sold only 20,000 units since its launch earlier this month, but Evangelidis went on to reveal that the device sold 29,537 units in its first day of sales alone, “breaking the record in its price segment”. The OnePlus executive called on the “media to maintain factual reporting and journalistic integrity”, while also noting that “decisions that impact people’s livelihoods are never taken lightly”.
In response, the author of the original article claims that the Nothing team had a full week to respond to the report’s findings, but “they had no official statement to give and did not deny anything” that was reported. Thus, the publication “sticks to its story”.
While we have no idea what’s actually going on at Nothing, we can say that if the sales figures presented by Akis Evangelidis are accurate (and we have no reason to believe that a high-profile executive would lie about this), then the fact that the report is completely false is quite worrying. If they got it so wrong, how can we be sure the rest of the report is accurate at all? The truth is that we can’t.
On the other hand, it would not be unusual for a company like Nothing to undergo layoffs, especially in a period like this, when smaller brands are disproportionately negatively impacted by rising memory prices (and especially smaller brands that compete only at the mid-range and entry-level, where margins are thin).