LeEco

» see leeco.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i missed leeco. it was a chinese consumer-electronics conglomerate from start to finish, the october 2016 san francisco launch event was a brief western brand push that did not last six months. my phones through the 2011-2017 window were a nokia n9 then a series of mid-tier android handsets bought locally in ankara. leeco never showed up in the turkish carrier lineups, the brand had no localized service network here.

this is mostly told from theverge and techcrunch reporting on the US arc. jia yueting founded the company as LeTV in september 2011 around an internet television business. the pitch grew over the next five years into an ecosystem play, smart TVs and phones and a content platform and a streaming bundle and an electric vehicle program through a separate carson california spinoff called faraday future. the rebrand to LeEco came in april 2016. close enough.

the san francisco launch event on october 19 2016 was the western coming-out moment. jia stood on stage at fort mason and announced the le pro 3 and le s3 phones plus the ecomass acquisition of vizio, the southern california TV maker, for two billion dollars. sergey brin was in the audience. the company also debuted a smartphone-as-a-service rental tier and a content subscription. it was a lot of product surface for a one-day event (or roughly).

this happened in real time, the cash crunch became public eighteen days later. on november 6 jia sent an internal letter to staff conceding that LeEco had grown beyond what its cash position could support. "we blindly sped ahead, and our cash demand ballooned." the letter said. the vizio deal was the first to fall, abandoned in april 2017 over the regulatory framing. the silicon valley office cut 70% of staff in may. the chinese parent's stock got suspended. faraday future limped on as a separate vehicle for jia's residual capital. leeco the brand never recovered from that quarter.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the ecosystem pitch actually was ~

the leeco pitch in 2015 and 2016 was that an integrated chinese consumer-electronics company could outflank apple by giving away the hardware margin and making the money on content subscription. the phones came bundled with a year of LeTV access. the smart TVs ran the same content layer. the cars were supposed to be running an in-vehicle version of the same content stack by 2018. the whole thing required cash flowing in three directions at once.

the tradeoff was that nothing in the ecosystem made enough margin to fund the next layer. the smartphone units cleared a million in the first quarter of sales but the gross margin was thin and the cost of acquiring US distribution was higher than the China model assumed. the vizio deal was supposed to fix the US TV distribution problem. when it died the rest of the western launch had no anchor point.

~ what got buried with it ~

the fallout was personal for jia. his domestic assets got frozen by a beijing court in mid-2017 for unpaid debts. he stayed in the US and pivoted to faraday future full time. by 2019 he had filed for personal bankruptcy in delaware to manage the chinese creditor claims. the chinese leeco TV business limped through a few owners and eventually went into administration. the brand still appears on some chinese smart TVs but the operating company is unrecognizable from the 2016 version.

faraday future itself stayed in a kind of pre-revenue purgatory for another seven years, never building cars at meaningful volume. the carson california factory ran skeleton-crew assembly through 2024. jia took the company through a SPAC merger in 2021 and watched the share price melt. nothing about the leeco run created a durable consumer brand outside china and very little of it survived as a coherent product line inside china either.

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