On December 21, LeTV, which had been silent for a long time, suddenly appeared under the spotlight, and its LeTV video and Letv official micro simultaneously released news that it would raise salaries for employees in the benchmark Internet factory. At this time, it has been 4 years since LeTV founder Jia Yueting left the United States, and 518 days have passed since LeTV was delisted.
The next day, LeTV video officials even said that without considering historical debt, the company's operating profit and cash flow have achieved a double balance. Even the long-dormant LeTV hardware intelligent ecology seems to have begun to restart, and the first national mobile phone S1 was released on September 28 this year.
The question is, the two sub-ecological businesses of LeTV Ecology have picked up, and what is the situation of LeTV VR, which once had unlimited scenery in the VR field, now?
The trees are scattered
According to leTV's official news, the main companies of this salary increase include LeTV.com and Lerong Zhixin, the former's core business is LeTV video, and the core business of the latter is LeTV's intelligent ecology, including TELEVISION. As for Jia Yueting's personal company, LeEco Holdings, it has no direct business connection with the company and is not involved.
Unfortunately, LeEco VR's main body, LeEco Virtual Reality Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd., is indirectly controlled by LeEco Holdings, and the ultimate beneficiary is Jia Yueting.
Founded in 2015, the company is still in existence, and completed a Series A financing of 300 million yuan in 2016, with a valuation of more than 3 billion yuan, which was the highest valuation VR enterprise in China at that time. The company's business integrates content production, channel distribution and product sales in the field of VR, covering movies, concerts, education, tourism, extreme sports, news documentaries, games and other fields.
In 2016, known as the first year of VR, BAT, Xiaomi, 360 and other giants rose up and began to lay out VR business, but on the TRACK of VR content alone, LeTV VR's momentum is unparalleled, claiming to build the "largest VR content application platform" and build a VR industry chain with cloud platforms, content sources, and terminals as the core.
However, the good times were not long, in May 2017, LeTV issued an announcement that Jia Yueting applied to resign as the general manager of LeTV, full-time chairman, Liang Jun as the general manager of the company, and then LeTV VR sent out the news of team dissolution.
LeTV VR responded at the time that the VR business was only a strategic transformation, and the related business, personnel, and products were transferred to the MFL (Make for LeEco) system. Through MFL, LeTV VR will continue to provide users with high-quality products and services, and Fans can still experience high-quality VR content through LeTV video VR channels, large-screen panoramic channels, LeTV VR products and LeTV APP.
But from the employee breaking news, the so-called team transformation only retained a very small number of people, since then LeTV VR in VR content and VR hardware have rarely released new products, once valued at more than 3 billion LeTV VR has been silent, even after 2020 THE VR industry began to pick up, LeTV VR has not been moved.
According to the enterprise investigation information, in February this year, LeTV Virtual Reality Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd. has been included in the list of serious illegal and untrustworthy enterprises by the Beijing Municipal Market Supervision and Administration Bureau, and the company is currently involved in 13 legal lawsuits, and the current number of insured persons is 0.
Borrowing corpses is difficult to return the soul
That is to say, LeTV VR is basically in a state of extinction in name only, and there is no actual operation to unfold, even in 2021, when the VR industry as a whole is picking up, there is no sign of borrowing a corpse to return the soul. The reason is that LeTV's debt problem cannot be solved.
As of the third quarter of this year, LeTV's total assets were 4 billion yuan, and the scale of liabilities reached 21.486 billion yuan, and its net loss from January 2021 to September 2021 was 162 million yuan, although the loss decreased by 82.66% year-on-year, but it is not realistic to solve the debt problem in the short term by relying on its own business revenue.
At the same time, Jia Yueting, the actual controller of LeTV, has been living in the United States since 2017 in an attempt to complete the Jedi reversal in the FF car business, but at present, there is little hope. Under the operation of Jia Yueting, FF officially landed on the NASDAQ on July 22 this year, and thus obtained about 1 billion US dollars of financing funds, with a total market value of 4.5 billion US dollars.
However, in October this year, J Capital Research, a US short-selling agency, released a 28-page report on FF, expressing doubts about FF from multiple angles such as production capacity, capital operation performance, and R&D investment, believing that "FF cannot sell even one car."
As of the close of trading on December 22, FF's market capitalization was only $1.6 billion, down nearly 70% from when it first went public.
On the whole, LeTV VR has been difficult to return to the VR card table, the content has a wealthy Youaiteng to chase and block, the hardware has long entered the Oculus, Pico as the representative of the all-in-one machine era, even if LeEco is now catching up, it is difficult to get a share of the market, not to mention that there are still more than 20 billion debts on the body.