Himanshu Tandon has stepped down from CMF, according to an exclusive report by Smartprix, ending one of the Indian smartphone industry’s most closely watched brand-building runs. Separately, Digit and Times Now can confirm Tandon’s departure after he was appointed as Vice President, Business at Nothing (CMF) in August 2025. Over the past year, Tandon was central to turning CMF from a Nothing sub-brand into a standalone business in India, building out its product line, retail presence and market strategy.
Before CMF, he was a founding member of Xiaomi’s Poco, where he served as India Head and helped the brand reach a 5.9% market share in early 2024. At CMF, he expanded the lineup beyond phones into smartwatches and earbuds and oversaw the CMF Phone 2 Pro, which was well received by users and became a bestseller in the sub-20K price range. He is also credited with the push to register CMF as a fully independent brand in India, rather than keeping it positioned purely as a Nothing sub-line.
Tandon’s exit lands at the same time as a broader recalibration at CMF. As we reported earlier, Nothing has paused all new CMF smartphone launches for 2026, with co-founder Akis Evangelidis citing memory and component costs that make a genuine successor to the CMF Phone 2 Pro unworkable at CMF’s price positioning. At least one device originally planned for CMF has reportedly been shifted to launch under the main Nothing brand instead. The pause also lines up with a wider slowdown flagged by CyberMedia Research (CMR), which recorded a 2% year-on-year decline in India smartphone shipments in Q1 2026, driven largely by rising DRAM and NAND prices that hit affordable and value-for-money segments hardest.
The timing raises an obvious question about how CMF, a brand Tandon spent the past year establishing as an independent operation, moves forward without the executive most closely associated with its rise. Industry executives credit him with building one of the strongest challenger brands in India’s affordable smartphone segment, a reputation that followed him from his earlier run steering Poco to meaningful market share.
Tandon has not announced his next move, but people familiar with the matter describe his next assignment as ‘substantially larger’ in scope than his previous roles, though no official announcement has been made yet.
We have reached out to Nothing India for comment on Tandon’s exit and will update this story if a response is received.