Text/Sun Pengyue
Edit/Gale
The Spring Festival is approaching, and it may not be a New Year's greeting to meet the workers, but a cold layoff call.
19 Internet factories announced layoffs, Internet practitioners are panicked, and no one knows which company will explode next. At the beginning of the year, LeTV, which still owed 12.2 billion yuan and was ridiculed by netizens as "the dream was finally suffocated", gave the hit workers a dose of strengthening agent.
On December 21, LeTV Video, Letv, and LeTV Intelligent Ecology official Weibo announced salary increases at the same time, announcing in a high profile that LeTV will benchmark Internet manufacturers.
In this cold winter of layoffs, the "retrograde" LeTV has earned enough eyeballs.
While in debt, raise salaries
In addition to the official Weibo voice, LeTV's personnel department also released an internal letter: "In November 2021, TV operations, mobile operations, advertising commercialization and other businesses have reached their annual business targets ahead of schedule. For the first time in several years, the latest operating figures, which are the first of its kind in years, have achieved a double balance of operating profit and cash flow, regardless of the impact of historical debt. ”
"Achieved ahead of schedule" and "a double balance of operating profit and cash flow", these two sentences are particularly striking.
And LeEco can achieve the perfect report card in 2021 is mainly for two reasons: First, the hardware business, LeEco intelligent ecology returned to the public eye, in addition to the two core products of TV and mobile phone, but also successively released VR, anti-wear headphones, game controllers and other digital 3C products, but also involved hoods, integrated stoves, smart door locks and other ecological products such as home kitchen appliances; the second is the content business, relying on the hardware to create the LeTV ecosystem began to show its glory, operating on the LeTV TV end, mobile terminal operation, Advertising commercialization and other businesses have achieved their annual business targets ahead of schedule.
Although the annual task was completed ahead of schedule, the hidden dangers behind LeTV are still worrying. In addition to tens of billions of liabilities, there are frequent rumors that LeEco will be split, and this rumor is also exposed in the salary increase announcement.
The main companies of LeTV's salary increase this time include LeTV.com and Lerong Zhixin, and do not include Jia Yueting's private company LeEco Holdings. Among them, the core business of LeTV is LeTV Video, and the core business of Le Rong Zhixin is the intelligent ecology of LeTV, including TV.
Although it belongs to leTV, but the relationship between its companies is complex, LeRong Zhixin as the core management of LeTV, it only has 25.1% of the equity attributed to LeTV, Sunac 100% controlled Tianjin Jiarui Huixin Enterprise Management Co., Ltd. is the largest shareholder, with 57.3% shareholding ratio and 69.2% final income shares.
Compared with leTV and LeRongzhixin, although they are a family, their core business is very finely divided. Among them, LeTV video is responsible for LeTV, which is also the current profit. However, since the development of the long video platform, LeTV Video has long been left behind, not only the market share is far inferior to Thatoteng, but even the second echelon of Mango TV and Sohu Video are not comparable.
The core business of Le Rong Zhixin, the LeTV ecosystem, is the key to LeTV's next layout.
Super TV to "LeTV"
Once LeTV Super TV is the first camp player in the field of Internet TV, Zhongyikang once released the "2016 China Color TV Overall Market Brand Share" report shows that the highest monthly total sales of LeTV Super TV is 715,000 units, accounting for 21.83% of the overall total sales, the first in the industry and omni-channel; in the distribution of brand share in China's smart TV market, LeTV ranks first with 9.6%.
At that time, LeTV super TV rode in the dust of smart TV, which is also the reason why LeTV empire was able to attract capital after the collapse.
In 2017, LeTV's capital chain was broken, and Sun Hongbin, chairman of Sunac China, entered the game, and he highly praised leTV's TV business: "At least in terms of doing TV, LeTV is doing better than Apple." ”
With super TV, LeEco won the injection of funds for itself, but the price of selling itself was that LeEco was split step by step.
First of all, in November 2017, under the impetus of Sunac, Leshi Zhixin, the operating main company of LeTV Super TV, officially changed its name to New LeTV Zhijia, and its business expanded from large-screen terminals to smart home Internet. After the name change, the parent company LeTV still holds 40% of the equity; while Sun Hongbin's Jiarui Huixin holds 33% of the equity, making it the second largest shareholder.
In April 2018, New Leshi Zhijia joined Sunac Culture and changed its name to Lerong Zhixin; in August of the same year, Lerong Zhixin completed the industrial and commercial change, according to the statistics of Tianyancha, 11 companies controlled by Sun Hongbin, Jiarui Huixin, Tencent's Linzhi Lichuang, JD.com's JD Bangneng, Suning, TCL and other 11 companies increased the capital of Lerongzhi by nearly 3 billion yuan. LeTV's shareholding in LeRongzhixin fell from 40.31% to 36.4%.
On September 22, 2018, Sunac took over all the assets of Le Rong Zhixin and LeTV Pictures held by LeTV Holdings at a total auction reserve price of 770 million yuan. At this point, Jia Yueting was completely out of Le Rong Zhi Xin; and Le TV's important assets were split, and the controlling right of Le Rong Zhi Xin, which operated LeTV's TV business, was taken by Sunac.
After Sunac gained absolute control over LeTV's super TV business, it officially announced the restart of LeTV's intelligent ecosystem. Dozens of new products have been launched, covering kitchen appliances, household appliances and other home appliances, and 3C digital, mobile phones, monitors and even charging cables, charging plugs, etc. are sold on the LeTV Mall.
The fifth generation of LeTV Super TV returned after several years of absence. At present, the new generation of LeTV Super TV has successively launched nearly ten products, with a wide price distribution, from a 32-inch entry-level smart TV with a price of 699 yuan to a 75-inch flagship smart TV G75S, priced at 4599 yuan.
In order to further "de-LeTV", Le Rong Zhixin once planned to rename "LeTV Super TV" to "Le Rong Super TV". But in the end, because users generally accepted LeTV, they gave up changing their name.
Although the name has not changed, the "heart" of television has changed.
Le Rong Zhixin continued to divest the LeTV business, and renamed the super film and television APP built into LeTV Super TV to Huaying Time APP, and the business was responsible for Le Rong Zhixin, which has been updated to version 2.0. Huaying Time APP not only owns the classic copyright dramas accumulated by LeTV for a long time, but also reaches a cooperation with Mango TV, a competitor of LeTV Video.
The "Super Family Member" launched by the Huaying Time APP can not only unlock the member episodes of LeTV Video, but also share Mango TV members and watch Mango TV's solo dramas.
One LeTV says two words, and can only say that LeTV's internal business is a mess.
The LeEco ecosystem is back
Not only tv, but also the former LeTV mobile phone is back.
In September 2021, the new generation of LeTV mobile phone S1 was released, with a starting price of 1599 yuan. LeEco held high the slogan of "national production", saying that chips, memory, screens, and manufacturing are all domestic manufacturers.
Loud slogans do not mean excellent quality. This S1 is equipped with Unigroup Zhanrui's Tiger Ben T7510 chip, which supports 5G functions and is a pure domestic chip, but its process is still 12nm in the three-year front desk. Compared to the general-purpose 5nm chip, the performance is very different.
Now the mobile phone market competition is extremely fierce, LeEco did not publicize the new machine with great fanfare, and the target customer base of S1 is the sinking market in fourth- and fifth-tier cities. Compared with mobile phone sales, LeTV is more like symbolically completing the ecological layout of LeTV.
Although it seems that LeTV is starting in a good direction, whether it is super TV or LeTV ecology, from hardware to software, it seems that It is still Jia Yueting's old way. It is nothing more than changing the name of the "Seven Great Ecologies" without the slightest innovation.
In the long video platform, LeTV TV is far behind Aiyouteng; in the field of smart TV, LeTV Super TV is not as good as Xiaomi TV and Huawei smart screen; in the mobile phone market, Xiaomi, which was once hot, is already the top three in global shipments... LeEco has left too much homework behind.
The market is no longer the market of the past, and Jia Yueting's set is not suitable for now. Now carrying tens of billions of debts, LeTV is still a mess inside, and it is still difficult to find its former glory.