If you’re like me, LeEco and Jia Yueting aren’t household names. Mr. Yueting is a Chinese billionaire who runs LeEco. We’ll talk aboutLeEco in a minute. But consider our picture of communism and socialism, laden with poverty. That may have been true in the past, but China seems to have blended some variation of socialism and capitalism, so that China has become one of the more recent growth markets for tech.
We know about Foxconn, Xiaomi and others that build for the world, some under someone else’s brand, some under their own, and some aiming specifically at the growing Chinese and Asian markets. LeEco, for now, fits that last category. And Jia Yuenting has some thoughts.
Jia called Apple “outdated,” claiming the reason for Apple’s slowing growth in the key Chinese market was down to a lack of innovation from the iPhone maker, pointing to the launch of the iPhone SE as an example.
This is from a conglomerate leader that makes mobile devices, is the Chinese equivalent of Netflix, and is building a prototype to compete with Tesla. Not exactly a “sit on your laurels” kind of company. Indeed, they’re an investor in Faraday Futures, which is building a $1,000,000,000 manufacturing plant just outside Las Vegas, to make electric cars. And they see the future of the Internet as being mobile.
Talking about Apple, Jia told CNBC: “We believe the next generation of mobile internet will be more open, more ecosystem oriented instead of being a closed loop. Ironically, Apple’s over-dominance, lack of internet-thinking and the closed-off nature of its systems, all hindered innovation in the internet mobile industry.”
He expanded on that further:
LeEco sees itself as an internet company first and foremost. “We think the difference between us and Apple is very large. Apple is a mobile phone company focused on hardware and software,” Jia said. “[LeEco] is focused on the internet first, and only then on software, and finally on hardware.”
That kind of thinking is the foundation of what it does. Remember we mentioned Tesla and LeEco as a potential competitor? That’s colored by a similar view.
“Tesla’s a great company and has taken the global car industry to the EV era,” Jia told Reuters. “But we’re not just building a car. We consider the car a smart mobile device on four wheels, essentially no different to a cellphone or tablet .”
The company was founded in 2004, with Jia’s vision of LeEcosystem, an online based combination of content, applications, and devices. As if mobile devices, online streaming, and electric cars aren’t enough, the company does more. LeEco has involved itself in cloud computing, agriculture, e-commerce, and video production. That’s besides its better known products.
When we think of people like Jia Yuenting, Elon Musk, and others we’ve yet to discover, tech hasn’t lost any of its lustre and just may be getting more exciting by the day!
[button link=”http://www.ibtimes.com/chinese-billionaire-jia-yueting-calls-apple-obsolete-says-leeco-plans-surpass-tesla-2359563″ icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: IBT[/button]
