Pei: US tariffs on China hit Nothing's earbud business by 20%
Carl Pei · Ep #23 | WTF are Consumer Electronics? | Nikhil ft. Carl Pei, Rahul Sharma & Amit Khatri · Nikhil Kamath · Apr 26, 2025 · at 16:43
Carl Pei, co-founder and CEO of hardware brand Nothing, explains how US trade tariffs against Chinese manufacturing directly affect his company's margins and supply chain.
0:00 / 0:17exact quote · 17.6s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“So now the most direct way is Trump had new tariffs for manufacturing from China. So we manufacture the earbuds in China. And that's like a 20% hit on our import business plans for the US market.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Carl Pei
Pei: Voice-Generated AI Apps Will Allow Smaller OSs to Challenge iOS
“In the future, you can just speak what app you want into the phone and that app shows up. So then that gives a smaller company like us the ability to compete with iOS, which has, I don't know, a 1,000,002 million apps already, but we can empower every normal p…”
Carl Pei: 80% of population will live on government income as AI advances
“I think most people are gonna, I think, 80% of the population will just chill and receive income from the government.
And a small group of people will leverage the new technologies to push society and humanity forward.”
Pei: There is no more opportunity in building new smartphone brands
“Personally, I don't think there's any more opportunity. And I wouldn't recommend any of my friends to go into this business right now. The market is very, very tough to compete in.”
Pei: Aspiring hardware founders should start as content creators
“If somebody was young and watching this and wanting to get into consumer electronics, I would urge them to first become a content creator.”
Pei: Smartphone Disruption Will Come From the OS, Not Hardware
“I think the disruption can happen on the OS side. I think the hardware side is very hard to differentiate on because all these suppliers that we have, they're all very concentrated, and they're very strong, and they're investing in their product roadmap, upgra…”