{"id":35700,"date":"2025-10-19T00:31:58","date_gmt":"2025-10-19T00:31:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/nothing-ceo-says-his-smartphone-startup-is-targeting-gen-z-to-break-into-a-market-dominated-by-apple-and-samsung\/"},"modified":"2025-10-19T00:31:58","modified_gmt":"2025-10-19T00:31:58","slug":"nothing-ceo-says-his-smartphone-startup-is-targeting-gen-z-to-break-into-a-market-dominated-by-apple-and-samsung","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/nothing-ceo-says-his-smartphone-startup-is-targeting-gen-z-to-break-into-a-market-dominated-by-apple-and-samsung\/","title":{"rendered":"Nothing CEO says his smartphone startup is targeting Gen Z to break into a market dominated by Apple and Samsung"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/68f3e0235dbc4fd10dab1d6b?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Carl Pei\"\/><figcaption>Nothing CEO Carl Pei<\/p>\n<p>Steve Jennings\/Getty Images for TechCrunch<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Nothing CEO Carl Pei said his smartphone startup is targeting young consumers.<\/li>\n<li>He said younger users are less taken by Apple because they didn&#039;t grow up watching it rise.<\/li>\n<li>The new smartphone maker has made inroads and is now valued at $1.3 billion.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The smartphone industry is a hard one for newcomers to break into. It&#039;s littered with failed attempts.<\/p>\n<p>But Carl Pei, the CEO of Nothing, a smartphone startup now valued at $1.3 billion, thinks he may have found a way in.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Our users are very young,&quot; Pei said on Alex Heath&#039;s Access podcast this week. &quot;It&#039;s pretty much impossible to be popular among everybody in the world at the very beginning, so we got to pick a lane.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Pei said the company has found that its products resonate best with younger consumers who are motivated by a desire to &quot;be different&quot; and find their &quot;own identity&quot; in the devices they choose.<\/p>\n<p>Apple&#039;s brand power is as strong as it once was among younger generations, he said, because they didn&#039;t grow up watching its rise.<\/p>\n<p>Pei said his company&#039;s average user is 26 years old. Meanwhile, for example, Samsung users are, on average, 45 years old, he said. For Apple, about 70% of its users fall between the ages of 18 to 44, according to 9 to 5 Mac, a news site that covers Apple products.<\/p>\n<p>As of the first quarter of 2025, Samsung took the lead in the global smartphone market, with Apple coming in a close second. They are the top two, followed by a handful of Chinese companies.<\/p>\n<p>Nothing, meanwhile, is carving a niche of its own. The five-year-old company now has between 800 and 900 employees and is on track to earn $1 billion in sales this year, Pei said.<\/p>\n<p>Nothing&#039;s smartphone models, like Phone 2 and Phone 3, range in price from less than $300 to $700. The phones have a similar structure and design to the iPhone, except for a clear back that exposes some of their internal hardware. In Business Insider&#039;s review of the Phone 2, Antonio Villas-Boas called the design &quot;striking&quot; with a &quot;surprisingly good camera&quot; and offers solid performance despite its slightly older processor.<\/p>\n<p>Pei doesn&#039;t expect Nothing to outpace Apple anytime soon. He says pacing is important and is thinking about how the two companies can coexist.<\/p>\n<p>He said Nothing is exploring &quot;new form factors&quot; that don&#039;t compete with Apple&#039;s products, but can be used in conjunction with them. In addition to phones, the company currently offers watches, headphones, and apparel.<\/p>\n<p>Nothing did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nothing CEO Carl Pei Steve Jennings\/Getty Images for TechCrunch Nothing CEO Carl Pei said his smartphone startup is targeting young consumers. He said younger users are less taken by Apple because they didn&#039;t grow up watching it rise. The new smartphone maker has made inroads and is now valued at $1.3 billion. The smartphone industry [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35701,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-35700","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}