The Chinese company LeEco was in a difficult financial situation. As reported by Chinese news site Tencent, as well as the Financial Times, the Shanghai court has frozen $ 180 million in assets of the company owned by its co-founder Jia Wetin, his wife, Gan Wei, and three subsidiaries. The initiator of the claim was the Chinese Bank China Merchants Bank, as LeEco ceased to pay him the interest on loans that the company took to its mobile business, the business of producing watches and other departments.
Not so long ago, LeEco was a rather obscure Chinese manufacturer of consumer electronics. However, after the company and its founder have launched three different projects for the production of electric vehicles (Faraday Future, LeEco LeSee and Lucid Motors), interest and market awareness has increased dramatically.
Signs of imminent problems began to appear last October. LeEco had planned to build a plant for the production of electric vehicles in Nevada (USA), but, as noted by Bloomberg, after careful review by the Treasury Department it became clear that LeEco is actually a not worth a billion dollars needed for construction of the factory. In the same amount it was appraised. The former CEO of Lucid Motors said in an interview with The Guardian that the company, he decided to leave due to the fact that LeEco “start acting like old-school Hong Kong company”.
A month later, these statements Jia Wetin admitted that LeEco is in financial trouble.
“We were moving too fast and eventually ran out of money. We’re targeting a global strategy, while not taking into account the fact that our finances and resources actually were limited,” said Jia.
After these revelations, the company’s position has rapidly deteriorated. First, the construction of a factory in Nevada was postponed, then LeEco has announced that it is selling its headquarters in Silicon Valley, and after the purchase of the company Vizio has been canceled. Soon after Jia left the post of General Director LeEco, the majority of employees in the United States was dismissed. And recently LeEco reported that it continues to lose huge amount of money, despite receiving an emergency loan of $ 2.4 billion.
Jia and some members of his family has mortgaged their property to secure this loan. Selling company stock to increase available capital stopped, however, the user already visited by representatives of regulatory authorities, interested in whether companies are able to buy them back. As specifies the Financial Times, freezing certain assets LeEco can be a sign of future bankruptcy, as such a situation could cause an avalanche of similar requests from other creditors of the company.
Chinese giant LeEco on the verge of bankruptcy?
Nikolai Khizhnyak