LeEco India has just fired 85 percent of its employees, and it seems like the company is leaving the country. This information comes from The Economic Times, and it comes as a surprise, despite the fact LeEco has been having some financial issues due to its investments and rapid expansion. LeEco managed to become quite popular really fast due to the fact they’ve been expanding to new markets really fast, and have been investing a lot of cash into such projects.
Interestingly enough, LeEco introduced their first smartphones back in April 2015, which means that they haven’t really been a smartphone manufacturer for that long, and it seems like LeEco wanted to achieve too much too fast. The company even expanded to the US a while back, in addition to a number of other regions, and they’ve also been investing plenty of cash into various other projects, Faraday Future is a good example. In any case, The Economic Times actually quoted three industry sources while reporting about recent layoffs in India, while the source also mentioned that two LeEco India execs left the company recently, Atul Jain and Debashish Ghosh, company’s Chief Operating Officer of Smart Electronics and Chief Operating Officer for Internet Applications, Services and Content, respectively.
Head of LeEco India, Alex Li, actually confirmed that the two executives have left the company, but he also added that LeEco is not leaving India. He said that the company is restructuring, which is why they had to fire employees, as they have a new vision for their business in India. That seems like a rather odd statement if the company fired 85%, and makes us wonder what kind of plans is LeEco having. LeEco’s Mumbai and Delhi offices have a minimum amount of staff at the moment. In addition to all that, a source which works with LeEco, an unnamed Senior Executive, said that the company will leave India, as they have been struggling to find their place in India’s extremely competitive market. These certainly are some bad news for the company, regardless whether they plan to leave India or not, as they’ve fired a lot of people, and are not doing all that well at the moment.