LeEco Still ‘Committed’ to US, It Says of Slashing Most of Its US Workforce

LeEco put a positive spin Tuesday on its decision to slash the vast majority of its U.S. workforce. It comes roughly six weeks after LeEco blamed "regulatory headwinds" for its failure in closing its $2 billion Vizio acquisition (see 1704100045). “The breadth of our business model is capital intensive, and our leadership has been working to secure the appropriate level of funding for the U.S.,” said a statement. “While we’ve made progress in growing our distribution channels, the challenges with raising new capital have made it difficult in the past few months to support all of our business’ priorities. As a result, the capital we do have will have to be highly focused resulting in a significant restructuring and streamlining of our business, operations and workforce. This will impact approximately 325 people in the U.S.” LeEco believes its vision “to remove the barriers between screens for consumers” is the correct one, “and analysts have acknowledged this,” the company said. “Because we can’t access the capital needed at this time, we will need to take a phased approach to the U.S. market. We will continue to operate in the U.S. with our existing product portfolio that puts content at the heart of the experience, and we believe that our products can compete.” LeEco remains “committed to the U.S. and supporting our existing consumers,” it said. “To further demonstrate this, last week we finalized on-shoring our customer care call center in order to enhance the customer experience for our U.S. consumers. Our goal is to continue to gain momentum. In the past few months, we have gained a large foothold in Chinese-speaking households in the U.S. by offering tailor-made products and content for this community. We believe this provides us an opportunity to build on our strengths and grow from there.”