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Jia
Yueting, who will remain as chairman and CEO of LeEco, envisions
the group maintaining its separate unlisted automotive unit but
rolling all other areas of business into Leshi Internet
Information & Technology Corp Beijing, according to a transcript
of his remarks to journalists on Sunday.
The firm has also trimmed loans by nearly half from a peak of 10
billion yuan ($1.45 billion), Jia said.
Shenzhen-listed Leshi said in a stock exchange filing that Liang
Jun, a long-time Lenovo Group Ltd executive who joined Leshi in
2012, will replace Jia as chief executive officer. Leshi's
finance chief Yang Linjie, who resigned for personal reasons,
will also be replaced by Zhang Wei.
The restructuring comes several months after the group received
a much-needed $2.2 billion investment from property developer
Sunac China Holdings Ltd.
Sunac said the management change is not an attempt to take more
control of Leshi, considered one of LeEco's healthiest assets.
But it marks a push to bolster the streaming business'
operations.
"There is no such thing as a fight for control," said Liu
Shuqing, a Sunac-appointed director on the board of Leshi,
according to the transcript of Leshi's Sunday briefing.
In a letter to all LeEco staff seen by Reuters, Jia called the
two appointments as Leshi's "most important milestone since its
IPO in 2010", and said they were aimed at improving the listed
company's performance.
Jia said in the letter his personal focus over the past two
years on LeEco's non-listed businesses, which include consumer
electronics and cars, had dragged down Leshi's development.
"I had expressed my apologies and gratitude to investors at the
end of last year and promised to refocus on our listed
businesses," Jia said in the letter.
"After we introduced the second-largest and strategic
shareholder (Sunac), we formally initiated a major restructuring
of Leshi."
Jia, who is continuing as chairman of Leshi, said he will "focus
on the governance, strategic planning and core product
innovation" of LeEco's listed units.
LeEco began with a Netflix-like video streaming service and
expanded into an array of products and services. The group has
been fighting a cash crunch since last year that Jia said was
the result of that aggressive growth.
($1 = 6.8906 Chinese yuan renminbi)
(Reporting by Sijia Jiang, Jake Spring and Hallie Gu; Editing by
Sam Holmes and Christopher Cushing)
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