LeEco, formerly known as LeTV, has been expanding internationally from their homeland of China after meeting with a fair amount of success there. They even managed to intro the world’s first Snapdragon 820 device, adding to their international clout. With their sights set on India, they loosed the Le 1s and Le Max first. The two phones met with a fair amount of success, garnering 300,000 registrants for a flash sale on local commerce site FlipKart, set to take place on February 2. According to the Chinese firm’s chief operating officer in India, Atul Jain, even more registrants are predicted by the time the flash sale actually happens. The two phones are priced fairly competitively, at 10,999 rupees for the Le 1S and 32,999 rupees for the Le Max. Along with the impact of these two smartphones, LeEco is planning to bring their VR and Smart TV products to India some time in the second or third quarter of 2016. In the VR field specifically, they’ll be bringing over the Le 3D Helmet, which launched in China back in September with a 5.5 inch 2660 X 1440 screen and a 70 degree view.
LeEco has thus far refused to confirm the price of their VR and Smart TV offerings, nor did they give word on the results of any talks with local telecoms. It is likely that they etched out some sort of agreement with RelianceJio, the telecom arm of Reliance Industries that’s building India’s largest 4G LTE network, but executives were silent about any talks. LeEco did say they wanted to eventually roll out their full product line to India, including smartphones, televisions, electric cars and many other product lines. Even their streaming service, akin to Netflix or Hulu, will eventually be headed to India. To that end, they have revealed that they’ve gotten in bed with ErosNow and YuppTV to secure content for the streaming service.
Despite overwhelming demand for LeEco’s products so far and even more being predicted, LeEco apparently isn’t sweating the supply logistics. Rivals such as Xiaomi and Oneplus who have entered India and found more demand than they could keep up with wound up overwhelmed, with a backlog of orders and many of them being cancelled. LeEco’s confidence that they won’t suffer such a fate seems to indicate that entering India’s market was planned for a while and they’ve been watching the competition to ensure they don’t make the same mistakes.