LeEco has been aggressively expanding its presence worldwide over the past year and is currently in the process of increasing its presence in the US consumer market. As part of this, the company has made a number of acquisitions over the past months and has also hired many new executives. The latest person to join the company is ex-Qualcomm executive Rob Chandhok, who will become LeEco’s new Chief of research and development (R&D) efforts in the US.
The new executive is perhaps best known for working at Qualcomm until 2014 and, most recently, was the president of IoT startup Helium – something that is sure to help the new executive considering LeEco’s efforts in the IoT sector. As well as this, the executive brings expertise in wireless networks, software and hardware systems. According to the new Chief of R&D, the user experience across ecosystems is currently too fragmented and it will be LeEco’s goal is to create a more unified user experience across a number of platforms such as smartphones, vehicles as well as other platforms. The hiring of Chandhok comes not long after the company also hired Richard Ren, a former Huawei executive who was brought in to help expand the company’s device business outside of China. A hiring which sees Ren become the president of the North American division for now. This also follows on from two more notably hires LeEco made earlier this year where two Samsung executives was also brought into the LeEco fold. As well as these hires, the company has also acquired a former Yahoo site for over $250 million and recently acquired electronics manufacturer Vizio for $2 billion.
Although LeEco is most likely to concentrate on mobile devices when it first enters the US consumer market, the company offers a wide variety of products in its homeland China, including electric bicycles, televisions and even has plans for its own self-driving electric car. With the company’s market entrance looming, the company is sure to be hard at work on everything from product development to marketing in order to make its US market presence felt as widely and as successful as possible.