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Businesses China The Almighty Buck United States

LeEco Said To Lay Off Over 80 Percent of US Workforce (cnbc.com) 104

Posted by BeauHD from the in-over-your-head dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: LeEco, a Chinese company that made a big splash in the U.S. last fall, is preparing for a round of layoffs that may happen as soon as Tuesday, according to sources. Two people told CNBC the company is planning massive layoffs in the U.S., with one source saying that only 60 employees will be left after the cut. The company's current headcount in the U.S. is over 500, according to this person. CNBC obtained an email calling employees together for a Town Hall Meeting that will occur in three of the company's U.S. locations, including San Diego, Santa Monica and San Jose, at 10 a.m. PST. The email asks employees to attend unless they're off for the day, in which case they're asked to call in. It's not clear what will be announced at the meeting, but a second source told CNBC that layoffs will be announced tomorrow. Under the restructuring, LeEco will refocus on encouraging Chinese-American consumers to watch LeEco's Chinese content library, one person said.
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LeEco Said To Lay Off Over 80 Percent of US Workforce More

LeEco Said To Lay Off Over 80 Percent of US Workforce

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  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @08:07AM (#54469201)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • According to the TFA, smartphones, TVs, Chinese media and electric cars. Initial reputation was "Netflix of China" before they expanded to US. Looks like someone had money to burn.

    • Signs of things to come. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @08:27AM (#54469281)

      The USA is becoming less and less dominate in the World. Most of the economic growth is in the Third World. And as they continue catching up, we will have more layoffs from both foreign and domestic firms and we will see our standard of living continue to decline.

      We had a great run from the end of WWII to about 2000. It was just a historical fluke but we Americans have come to think that it's the norm because of our "exceptionalism". Well we're regressing back to the mean of our historical pre-WWII growth of about 1 - 2%. And there is nothing politically that can be done about it - contrary to what Trump and his supporters believe.

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Wow, any piece can be used for anti-US propaganda. Stuff happens. The US may not be perfect, but there is a reason why the top tier businesses come to the US, and that is freedom of speech and collaboration. You can make fun of the President and not disappear. You can troll and not disappear.

        If you want to know when to put on the brown pants, is when the top think tanks and intelligent people/groups start abandoning the US to go to another country. Some ratty Chinese unicorn-wannabe... who cares. When

    • Re:Who are they (Score:5, Informative)

      by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @08:34AM (#54469305)
      From the sounds of the original link, they manufactured hardware containing spyware.

      LeEco started out in China as a streaming media provider — it has been referred to as the "Netflix of China" — and looked to expand into the US by selling affordable hardware that linked consumers to media content from LeEco's partners. Its first batch of products included two smartphones and several TVs, all of which offered flagship-level specs at affordable prices. The idea, it seemed, was that LeEco would make its money back when consumers tuned in to partner programming.

  • Ouch (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Wouldn't it be horrible if you found out you were about to be laid off from a Slashdot article?

    • Wouldn't it be horrible if you found out you were about to be laid off from a Slashdot article?

      ...or better yet, having it appear on the National News on a TV screen behind you, while you were speaking to a room full of your co-workers?

  • transit (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The U.S. depends upon the ability to force the world to use the U.S. dollar to buy oil. As the world transits away to renewable energy, the ability of the U.S. to print money and have it bought by the rest of the world declines, leading to inflation and economic decline.

  • astonishingly bad summary (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SethJohnson ( 112166 ) on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @08:44AM (#54469355) Homepage Journal
    It would be helpful to readers if the summary contained any info at all about the company's main product or reason why this is significant. Instead, the summary dwells only on the method of the layoffs, which is not original at all.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Desler ( 1608317 )

      There isn't a main product. It's a congolmerate that tries to do a bit of everything.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mitreya ( 579078 )

      It would be helpful to readers if the summary contained any info at all about the company's main product or reason why this is significant.

      Oh, it is actually all there in the summary. LeEco is clearly a company that sold wild Orcas... or pool supplies...
      Plus the TFA refuses to work in presence of adblocker, so we are keeping the article and the discussion strictly separated as is tradition.

      LeEco, a Chinese company that made a big splash in the U.S. last fall, is preparing for a round of layoffs that may happen as soon as Tuesday,

  • Layoff - a discharge, especially temporary, of a worker or workers

    I love how business has gotten so good at crafting the message. They didn't fired everyone, they were layed off. Like the dead were going to come back to life or something.

    • Re:The Politically Correct Business BS (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @09:22AM (#54469603)

      There is a difference in the terms:
      Fired = let go for cause.
      Laid off = let go due to company downsizing or similar, not due to employee fault.

      Sometimes there's a reason people use different words, and it's usually because they have different meanings.

      • Re:The Politically Correct Business BS (Score:5, Informative)

        by Pascoea ( 968200 ) on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @09:34AM (#54469679)
        Also a difference in Unemployment Insurance claims. You get fired you get no unemployment (rationale being it was something you did that caused you to get fired.) If you get laid off (indicating it was an outside force that caused you to lose your job) you get unemployment insurance payments.

      • Re:The Politically Correct Business BS (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Trailer Trash ( 60756 ) on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @09:36AM (#54469699) Homepage

        There is a difference in the terms:
        Fired = let go for cause.
        Laid off = let go due to company downsizing or similar, not due to employee fault.

        Sometimes there's a reason people use different words, and it's usually because they have different meanings.

        Not only that, but if you grew up in a factory town like I did there was a big difference between being fired and being laid off. Laid off was often temporary. If sales were down the factory would cut back on production and cut back on staffing by laying off some workers. When sales were back up the laid off workers were called up again. That's pretty normal.

  • Thanks Trump.

  • Not a good thing in the long run (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DeplorableCodeMonkey ( 4828467 ) on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @09:43AM (#54469759)

    Under the restructuring, LeEco will refocus on encouraging Chinese-American consumers to watch LeEco's Chinese content library, one person said.

    Note what LeEco is saying here: they're creating Chinese content for US citizens who are of Chinese descent. They're not trying to open up the American market in general the way the Japanese did with anime, video games, etc. This is targeted by ethnicity.

    More and more this seems to really be a thing with the immigrant diasporas in the West, and it's going to bring multi-culturalism down hard. Multiculturalists like to say "well the Italians integrated you racist!!" Well, yes they did, but I also know virtually no descendants of Italian immigrants that actually think they're Italian, speak Italian and frankly give a shit what happens in Italy. It is more "cultural flavor" and closer to white Southerners being proud of their heritage than a truly distinct claim on ethnicity.

    So take whatever difficulty you'd have integrating a racially diverse set of new immigrants into a still largely homogeneous society, add in a heaping dose of Capitalist encouragement to not give up the old ways and you have a recipe for long term, very severe ethnic conflict. In the long run, there are few things we all share deeply in common at group levels, but one of those things is tribalism. You can indoctrinate that out of us about as well as you can indoctrinate pack instincts out of dogs.

    • It is more "cultural flavor" and closer to white Southerners being proud of their heritage than a truly distinct claim on ethnicity.

      I take it you have never been to the deep south...

    • We (humans) like to fight, if we are not fighting over oil / water / land etc. we will fight over whether the playstation is better than the xbox - it's the way we are wired.

    • More and more this seems to really be a thing with the immigrant diasporas in the West, and it's going to bring multi-culturalism down hard. Multiculturalists like to say "well the Italians integrated you racist!!" Well, yes they did, but I also know virtually no descendants of Italian immigrants that actually think they're Italian, speak Italian and frankly give a shit what happens in Italy. It is more "cultural flavor" and closer to white Southerners being proud of their heritage than a truly distinct claim on ethnicity.

      That could be true for the example you said; however, it meant that you have no idea of Chinese culture. Many Chinese people (from mainland China) are loyal to their country of origin regardless where they are residing (in China or else where). They teach their descendants to keep similar loyalty to China. Thus, the company target might work at a certain degree. However, I have no idea on the company strategy, so I can't give any comment on how successful their strategy is (likely unsuccessful).

      • however, it meant that you have no idea of Chinese culture. Many Chinese people (from mainland China) are loyal to their country of origin regardless where they are residing (in China or else where). They teach their descendants to keep similar loyalty to China.

        I am actually quite well aware of this tendency among the Chinese, which is why to the extent that we allow immigration from China it should be both very limited and immigrants who betray their new citizenship should be ruthlessly dealt with by the l

    • More and more this seems to really be a thing with the immigrant diasporas in the West, and it's going to bring multi-culturalism down hard. Multiculturalists like to say "well the Italians integrated you racist!!" Well, yes they did, but I also know virtually no descendants of Italian immigrants that actually think they're Italian, speak Italian and frankly give a shit what happens in Italy.

      The main difference between the Chinese and Italian waves of immigration is 100 years. Look at Italian integration one or two decades after the mass immigration in the 1900's. That is the period that is comparable to the current Chinese cultural evolution. The slow waning of Italian identity took over half a century. I grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood in the 80's. Even then, Italian identity, including speaking Italian, eating Italian food, being proud of being Italian, was still strong.

      The

      • People from China, and the rest of Asia, have been coming to North America for at least 150 years so I don't understand where you are saying this is the second and third generation. There were spikes in immigration for gold rushes and building of the Canadian railways (don't know about the American ones).

        • People from China, and the rest of Asia, have been coming to North America for at least 150 years so I don't understand where you are saying this is the second and third generation. There were spikes in immigration for gold rushes and building of the Canadian railways (don't know about the American ones).

          This is exactly my point. The latter generations of Chinese-Americans don't have European faces but otherwise "look" like Americans. They have American names, eat American food, play American sports, listen to American music, etc. It's the first generation that struggles to adopt the new culture, and this is true of all immigrants, even from Europe.

          There have been three waves of Chinese immigration: a small wave around 1850 to 1882 (when Chinese immigration was legally outlawed), a second small wave fro

    • More and more this seems to really be a thing with the immigrant diasporas in the West, and it's going to bring multi-culturalism down hard. Multiculturalists like to say "well the Italians integrated you racist!!" Well, yes they did, but I also know virtually no descendants of Italian immigrants that actually think they're Italian, speak Italian and frankly give a shit what happens in Italy. It is more "cultural flavor" and closer to white Southerners being proud of their heritage than a truly distinct claim on ethnicity.

      The key difference is that in prior waves of immigration being assimilated in terms of language and culture was pushed - and surprise surprise they did indeed become Americans. This was the melting pot idea and it largely worked. Now we coddle them, don't expect them to learn the language, don't expect them to follow the law (yes illegal immigration is illegal), and really don't seem to care if they "melt in". We don't look after the people already in the country but we can't wait to let more in. And we

  • So company that I've never heard of goes out of business... Umm why isn't that a surprise? How's this even news? I initially actually mistook the company name for "La Crosse" which makes a lot of home weather monitoring equipment. I wonder if anyone else thought this...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jandrese ( 485 )
      They were a multibillion dollar conglomerate with products ranging from streaming video, home electronics, handheld electronics, and even futuristic electric vehicles. They were not well known in the English speaking US outside of their Faraday Future division, but that doesn't mean they were some tiny mom and pop outfit. At least they are failing early so there isn't as much pressure for an investor or a government to step in and save them at great expense.

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