Chinese streaming video service Letv announces its Le Superphone smartphone is headed for the US, in a profoundly unconvincing pitch
Casey Newton / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2015 announcement is the opening move in LeEco's American campaign: a streaming-video company pitching a phone whose appeal rests on bundled media rather than hardware credentials, as its own positioning against Xiaomi via entertainment-media differentiation from its streaming origins makes clear. The Verge's skepticism about the pitch turned out to be prescient.
What followed is well documented in the related coverage: a $2B bid for TV maker Vizio meant to shortcut distribution, then a rapid collapse chronicled in how LeEco's effort to 'buy its way into marketshare' in America unraveled. The Le Superphone line did continue briefly at home with the Le Pro3, a $399 Snapdragon 821 handset that notably dropped the headphone jack.
First-order effects
- US consumers are being asked to buy a flagship-class phone from a brand with no carrier relationships or retail presence in America, making price-and-content bundles — not specs — the entire sales case.
Second-order effects
- Lacking organic traction, LeEco turns to M&A as a distribution shortcut, attempting the Vizio acquisition to put its app layer on American living-room screens rather than winning phone shelf space outright.
Third-order effects
- The failed land-grab becomes a template lesson for the next wave of Chinese hardware makers: by 2022 Nothing launches its £399 phone in 40+ markets while pointedly skipping the US, and the broader Chinese phone market assessment finds hardware at Western-parity but software still lagging — the exact gap Letv's bundle-first pitch tried to paper over.
The trend: Chinese phone makers' attempts to enter the US have swung from acquisition-funded land grabs like LeEco's to strategic avoidance of the market altogether.