When OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei departed the corporate he helped create and switch into a worldwide success story to begin a wholly new enterprise known as “Nothing” (of all issues), I’ve to confess… I did not know what to suppose. However whereas the title of the UK-based client electronics outfit continues to baffle me (and sometimes make my work unnecessarily troublesome), there is no denying Pei’s loopy gamble appears to be paying off moderately handsomely.

What’s hiding beneath Nothing’s massive numbers?

You do not have to be a math whiz to know that it is (theoretically) a lot simpler to multiply one apple by seven than one million or ten million apples. In different phrases, you may’t count on Apple (the corporate) or Samsung to spice up their quarterly smartphone shipments by near 700 p.c… except we uncover life on one other planet, and mentioned planet decides to embrace Earth’s iPhones en masse.

That being mentioned, there are many smartphone distributors (each new and previous) that would theoretically enhance their gross sales scores by 693 p.c, however are as an alternative struggling to search out development of 69.3 and even 6.93 p.c. I am you, Sony. And also you, Asus. And Huawei, and Realme, and even Google and Motorola.

That makes Nothing’s Q2 2024 progress in comparison with the identical interval of final 12 months a reasonably unimaginable achievement no matter what the corporate’s Q2 2023 start line was.

It might not sound prefer it, however that 246 p.c year-on-year development estimated for the primary half of 2024 is maybe much more exceptional, suggesting a longer-term development that Nothing may properly maintain going ahead. For the way lengthy? That, my pals and expensive readers, is the million or perhaps billion-dollar query, and it is determined by method too many variables to debate in a single article.

The sky is the restrict for Nothing’s development. Or is it?

Trying on the Q2 2024 smartphone market report the place Nothing does not rank within the prime 5 world distributors, one can simply discover there’s virtually nothing new beneath the solar (darn it, one other “nothing” pun). That implies breaking into the business’s main league isn’t any simple feat, which in flip means Nothing’s progress will in all probability decelerate sooner moderately than later.

OnePlus simply so occurs to be the right instance of a model that grew and grew and grew till hitting an invisible ceiling of kinds and a stagnation level that is beginning to appear unattainable to flee from. As a result of following his previous firm’s path as much as that time appears like an especially dangerous endeavor, Carl Pei could wish to make sure that early on that Nothing will not repeat the OnePlus errors of the previous couple of years.

What I like about Nothing is that its merchandise nonetheless carry a novel and distinctive id, which… might not be potential for lengthy. The corporate will inevitably need to undertake extra standard designs as its gross sales volumes proceed to develop, and at that second, we’ll in all probability discover out precisely what Carl Pei‘s long-term intentions for this model are.

For my part, there are two paths Nothing may take after one other one or two quarters of “natural” development. The OnePlus path, during which short-term development stifles model id with probably catastrophic results in the long term, and a highway so only a few firms are daring sufficient to decide on, the place Nothing continues to fabricate distinctive (however hard-to-scale) merchandise, placing its authentic values and rules above income.