Jia Yueting will no longer serve as chief executive of Leshi Internet Information & Technology Corp Beijing. The company is a part of Yueting’s larger business empire known as LeEco.
LeEco started off with a video streaming service similar to Netflix but quickly expanded to provide new products and services ranging from consumer electronics to cars.
About six odd month ago, LeEco made news because it was facing a cash crunch because of its goal of rapid global expansion along with a back to back product release timeline. Yuating, at that point in time, admitted that the company had set far reaching goals that it was finding difficult to achieve with its capital running out rapidly.
Yuating further added that the cash crunch was a result of the company also seeking billions of dollars in new funding, cutting staff, and the $2 billion transaction to acquire US television maker Vizio falling through.
To deal with the cash crunch, LeEco sold off land that it had bought from Yahoo to set up American offices at a profit of $10 million. It also heavily scaled down its operations in India and let go off about 85% of the staff. One of the main reasons that LeEco decided to scale down in India is because the country was no longer an attractive market because of the fall in sales after demonetisation began.
While Yueting will step down from the position of CEO, he will continue to be the chairman. He will focus on corporate governance, strategic planning and core product innovation. According to a stock exchange filing on 21st May that revealed this news, in addition to this change in power, the company’s finance chief is also going to step down due to personal reasons.
The board has appointed Lenovo executive Liang Jun who joined Leshi in 2012 to take over the position of CEO while Zhang Wei, the company’s China CFO will take over as the new finance executive.
