LeEco is having a rough time. Less than a year ago the company started making its big push in the United States, and as part of that it launched a number of phones and TVs — and even announced plans to build a electric sports car, an effort out to out-Tesla Tesla. In June of 2016, it purchased a 49-acre Silicon Valley property from Yahoo; at the time, CEO Jia Yueting said that the building would end up being an “EcoCity that houses 12,000 employees.”
Unfortunately for LeEco, its big U.S. push hasn’t really caught on, and that EcoCity may not end up being its Silicon Valley home after all. According to a report from Reuters, the company has sold the property to Genzon Group for a hefty $260 million.
“We’ve always envisioned EcoCity would be an open environment that would be a place for our employees, our partners, and the community to collaborate,” the company wrote in an emailed statement to Digital Trends. “LeEco has been working to identify additional investors as well as a development partner but we have nothing to announce at this time.”
The news makes sense. We already knew that LeEco was suffering some money issues, as admitted by Yueting in an email to employees in November. Reuters has also since reported that the company has significantly reduced the size of its U.S. workforce, and reports indicate that the company is struggling to pay debts to suppliers and business partners.
It will be interesting to see how LeEco fares over the next few years. The phones it unveiled last year were actually pretty solid — and very powerful for the price. We don’t know how well they actually sold, but given the recent news, we’re willing to bet it wasn’t too well.
