You ever get the feeling you’re watching a company unravel in real-time?

Chinese electronics and media company LeTV changes its name to LeEco at at the start of 2016 as part of a move to build out a whole ecosystem of products and services. The company unveiled some interesting devices, announced plans to acquire US TV maker Vizio, and started offering phones in the US market.

That was last year. In 2017 all of that has started to fall apart. The latest news? TechCrunch reports that Vizio is suing LeEco for $100 million.

The merger failed to go through, but there was a clause in the agreement that required LeEco to pay $100 million if that happened. Vizio claims that LeEco wants to pay less than half of that.

Variety has more details on the lawsuit, as well as a copy of the legal document.

Then again, it’s not entirely clear at this point just how much cash LeEco has lying around.

In March we learned the company was selling its recently-acquired property in Silicon Valley and scaling back its US plans. A month later the company killed off it subscription service. And in May LeEco laid off two thirds of its US workforce.

And TechCrunch reports that even after a recent $2.2 billion investment in the company, LeEco is still short on cash. Some of the company’s employees in China aren’t going to get paid until August 10th, which is the third time paychecks have been delayed this year.

Oh, and some of LeEco’s assets have also been frozen.

It’s been a busy year and a half for LeEco. Now the company also has to contend with the Vizio lawsuit as it tries to dig itself out of a hole that just seems to be getting bigger and bigger.

 

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7 replies on “LeTrainwreck: Vizio sues LeEco for $100 million after failed merger”

  1. Sure looks like we’re watching a company fall apart in LeEco. A shame to see. Their loss was my gain as I took advantage of a deal through this site’s daily deals a few weeks ago to pick up the Le S3, the SD652 model. Fantastic phone so far after installing a custom image. The only quirk seems to be that it’s temperamental when it comes to chargers. It’s a nice product. A shame about apparent mismanagement. It will serve as a lesson to others.

    1. I have the S3 since launch and I like it, great hardware. I haven’t done anything with the ROM as I was hoping for regular updates. That hasn’t happened since Feb. and I’m not holding out much hope now.
      Which custom rom did you install?

      1. I was debating between Lineage and Resurrection Remix when I got the phone. I went with RR v5.8.3. I like it a lot, though I have encountered a couple of issues. The included camera app hasn’t worked for me, but Open Camera has worked mostly in my limited use. I haven’t investigated it much yet as cameras are at the bottom of the list of things I care about on a phone. I also experienced an issue with customizing the quick settings, but there was a workaround.

  2. they tried to expand too fast and they imploded if they had just stuck with their streaming business and expansion to the US with the phones being sold at cost to encourage use of their streaming service. They should have partnered with some US film studios to get some domestic content, while leveraging their regular content, they could have been a good competitor for crunchyrollI. I think they’d be in a much better position to expand to if they’d have had an established brand name in the US before diverging into the automotive business. I was actually kinda rooting for them on their cars. I hope they can recover, and still sell to the US market, with the cost of their phones they could possibly rebound if they can get streaming to be a viable business. Netflix is a billion dollar business..

  3. Vizio should just be happy that they weren’t bought. It would have been another Homegrocer.com situation–get bought and then go out of business.

  4. Vizio makes a damn good product and should retain ownership and keep doing what they are doing so well!

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