Chinese Giant LeEco Buys Vizio For $2 Billion, Gets Instant Foothold In US Market

Chinese electronics conglomerate LeEco is purchasing American TV manufacturer Vizio for $2 billion, the company announced at a press conference in China on Tuesday. The announcement effectively gives LeEco, formerly known as LeTV, an instant foothold in the U.S. television market. For a refresh, for those who haven't heard much about LeEco, it's one of China's biggest electronics companies. Founded in 2004, it offers a range of services including live-streaming, e-commerce, cloud, smartphones, TV set-top boxes, and smart TVs among many other products and services. One of the recent areas where it has invested its time on is an electric car, which we talked about here a few weeks ago. From a report: Vizio is primarily known for its televisions, like the P-Series sets that we recently unboxed, but they've also dipped their toes into Android. For example, Vizio released a 10-inch tablet a few years ago, and the aforementioned P-Series TV set ships with a 6-inch Android tablet that you use as a remote. Once Vizio is acquired by LeEco, it'll be operated as an independent subsidiary and the current management will remain in California. LeEco CEO Jia Yueting commented on the deal, saying, "We hope that we can use the ecosystem model and create a great integration between Vizio and LeEco and create new values for U.S. users."Having talked to the executives of LeEco in the past few months, I understand that the company intends to bring its products to the American market before its rival Xiaomi does. Xiaomi also intends to bring its smartphones and TVs to the U.S. and European market, but is currently dealing with different regulations.

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[D00MSlayer]

Because that's not how it works, and the USD, despite being fiat currency, still has value.

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[Kiuas]

This is why Zimbabwe dollars don't have value too. This is why as I said above and got modded 0,Insightful so far

No, the reason you got modded to 0 is because you do not seem to understand that there are actual practical reasons for why fiat money is used: namely that the global economy is of such size, that we don't have anywhere close to enough precious metals to produce coins or representative bills for all trade to be conducted, that way. Like, just as a rough estimate: according to wiki's 2011 numbers [wikipedia.org]

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[sabbede]

All value is fiat. It is an entirely subjective concept. In other words, the US dollar has value for the same reason gold has value - we agree that it does. There's no point to the intermediate step of basing the value of a currency on a fiat-valued commodity, and several good reasons not to do so. A commodity base divorces the value of a currency from the national economy, greatly magnifying downswings in the business cycle, makes managing inflation/deflation much more difficult, makes a mess of intern

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[cayenne8]

Why can't we regulate the sales of US companies to foreign governments....?

Hell, I'd not put it past the Chinese to enable even more spying on the whole US though their new consumer products line they now have access to....

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[TFlan91]

They don't need ownership to do that, just access to the hardware, which they already have via manufacturing.

Vote trump to get that!

[Joe_Dragon]

Vote trump to get that!

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[Kokuyo]

Vote for a billionaire to get people to stop selling to the highest bidder no matter where they come from.... riiiight. The same Trump who has his merchandise produced in Bangladesh and China.

There's an old fable where mother sow brings her piglet to the butcher because he ought to know best how a pig works, right? Well... I'm actually not sure if such a fable exists, but it ought to.

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[magarity]

Meanwhile the supposedly Communist government in China prohibits complete foreign ownership of companies in China. The best foreigners can do is just a little below owning half.

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[Anonymous Coward]

That's not true. While China does have limits and restrictions on foreign ownership in some sensitive industries, complete foreign ownership of companies in China is allowed in most industries, e.g., Anheuser-Busch has several wholly owned subsidiaries in China.

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[Mike Frett]

You can't elect any President that will bring Jobs back to the United States. You can't force Companies to do what you want or else they may all leave. What you can do is offer incentives to stay or come back; chances are they will go where labor is cheapest. If Americans want more Jobs, they need to start accepting lower wages.

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[Joe_Dragon]

and just show up at the ER when they get hurt as they have no health care plan and no workers comp

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[The-Ixian]

Why can't we regulate the sales of US companies to foreign governments....?

Because that would be government regulation of the holy capitalist system.

You see, the capitalist system is self regulating and self correcting.

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[CanadianMacFan]

Every government, including the US, does regulate the sale of companies to foreign firms. The US won't allow the sale if it would compromise national security. So unless Vizio is working on something for the NSA or the military then the sale will probably go through since it's a pretty small company doing pretty generic electronics work.

If the US blocked every sale to a foreign firm then US companies would quickly find themselves being unable to buy companies in other countries.

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[wcrowe]

Good source? My Vizio is without a doubt the worst tv I have ever owned.

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[D00MSlayer]

Vizio's were never really that good in the first place. Try LG, Sony, or Samsung.

Re:RIP

[hey!]

Errr... the build quality for Vizio TVs is dreadful. I had one fail twice in the warranty period and then of course immediately after the warranty expired.

Opening the thing up the mainboard of the device was fastened to the backlight panel chassis with packing tape. I'd never seen such shoddy construction, not to mention the very poor quality of the boards themselves.

In general I think the idea of "smart tvs" is bad for the consumer economically. On top of that selling our viewing habits a profit center for Vizio on their already crappy throw-away TVs. And to add insult to injury, the UI for most smart TVS is just terrible. I replaced the Vizio with a Samsung, not because I wanted another smart tv, but because it was cheap. Not only was the search function hopelessly broken, the damn thing interrupted stuff I was watching on Netflix or Amazon with service change bulletins for Samsung services I neither subscribed to nor used. How could any UI designers be so damned stupid.

But you almost can't get a smallish HD TV that's not "smart". I ended up with a Hitachi "Roku TV" which is just a plain old TV with a Roku stick stuck in one the HDMIs. I'm much happier with Roku's UI and service, but if I wanted to I could just pop the Roku stick out and have a plain old TV.

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[ZipK]

But you almost can't get a smallish HD TV that's not "smart".

But you can leave the network connection unconfigured and not use any of the Smart functions.

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[negRo_slim]

That just doesn't change the fact the market is failing to provide a desired option to a segment of their potential customers.

There simply is not enough competition.

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[alvinrod]

And what most PC buyers wanted back in the day was a clean version of Windows that wasn't packaged with loads of bloatware and other crap, but the companies selling the computers (or TVs in this case) were getting paid a small bit to include all of that cruft that no one really wanted which let them undercut anyone who wasn't bundling. Most consumers have little more knowledge about TVs than they do about computers so they think the shit sandwich they're being served is supposed to be some kind of culinary

That's Interesting & Irrelevant

[Anonymous Coward]

Well your anecdote is interesting, but it's also fairly irrelevant on several levels.

1. I have an anecdote too. There are presently 3 Vizio TVs in my home, 36"1080p 6Yrs., 47"1080p 7Yrs., 70" 4K 2Yrs. They all work perfectly. They all have EXCEPTIONAL pictures and dynamic contrast levels, especially for their bargain price. None have given any trouble at all. The case of the 70" does occasionally make a popping noise(unobtrusive unless muted) due to heat expansion when changing from a brightly lit display t

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[hey!]

My picture was nice too, but they had system boards that shouldn't have made it through basic inspection, and of course the mechanical design was absurd. Since there was no provision for mounting the system boards in a conventional way I have to conclude that the sloppy construction at least was by design.

Now as for whether LeEco build quality will be better, worse, or the same, I have no opinion. I'm just reacting to the notion that Vizio makes a quality TV. In my experience it doesn't. Your experience

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[sims 2]

I haven't seen any of the newer vizio smart tvs but every one i've gotten to play with to date has had that yahoo based thing and had support for youtube and no other functioning video services
Otherwise the two smart tv's at home are an LG and a samsung.

The LG is still receiving occasional software updates has one of those magic remotes support for both netflix and amazon but no netflix profiles support.

The samsung is a couple years newer and has something similar to the magic remote. It supports netflix am

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[hey!]

My experience with Samsung smart TV is such that I'd never buy another one again. I'm happy with the Hitachi, though.

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[sims 2]

Out of curiosity what problems did you have with yours? I've only had the samsung a few months. The only three annoyances I've noticed are that it doesn't have the strongest tuner (I still can't get channel 13), the audio goes out of sync in the amazon app and it can only have one smart remote.

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[Holi]

Vizio was a "good" source of tvs. I always saw them as the also ran to Samsung and LG. Weren't they the first to start data mining their customers tv usage to sell to advertisers http://www.networkworld.com/ar... [networkworld.com]

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[SeaFox]

Regardless, it now is a Chinese brand.

Yes. Sadly in the near future Vizio TVs will be made in China, whereas before...
Wait. What did we really lose here again?

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[The-Ixian]

Me too. Perhaps they will bring some quality to the brand.

Seems like Made in America is actually a statement of lesser quality these days.

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[sims 2]

American car hahahaha.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
It's not a new trend Gung Ho came out back in 1986.

But vizio is considered one of the cheap junk brands here.

What I want to know is why about 1/3 of all vizio remotes don't have any letters or numbers on them any more?
I've never seen any other brand do that.

Sure it's a great match with a daskeyboard but it's not really supposed to be.

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[wcrowe]

That was exactly my thought.

Vizio?

[thegarbz]

Forget LeEco who the heck is Vizio? I didn't know there were any American TV manufacturers.

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[operagost]

Yes, but it doesn't really matter, because like near 100% of all electronics companies the product is made in China.

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[jon3k]

How have you not heard of VIZIO? They're extremely [tomsguide.com] well [cnet.com] reviewed [thewirecutter.com], inexpensive and carried by all the major [bestbuy.com] big box [walmart.com] stores [target.com].

If you've never heard of VIZIO then I'm guessing you haven't shopped for TVs in about 10 years.

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[thegarbz]

I haven't shopped in America. Is it a USA only company that don't have an international footprint? I have literally NEVER heard of them, despite having purchased two TVs in the past 10 years (Toshiba and a Samsung) and live both in Europe and Australia.

Communist China

[MrKaos]

They seem to be getting the hang of capitalism.