LeEco buys Vizio for $2 billion

Proving once again how serious it is about making it big in the US market, Chinese tech company LeEco has announced that it is acquiring Vizio, the American TV maker. The deal is worth around $2 billion, and insures an instant foothold for LeEco into the US TV market, what with Vizio being a key player there.

Despite the new ownership, Vizio will be operated as a separate entity, a wholly-owned subsidiary of LeEco. The Vizio brand will live on, as you might have expected given LeEco's non-existent recognition in the States. It will be interesting to see whether LeEco will decide to use the Vizio brand for its smartphones when it starts selling them in the US - or if it will confine Vizio to TVs and audio products.

So far LeEco has entered many different spaces pretty aggressively, including the smartphone market last year. It's only launched a few phones so far, but they've all been very successful in China. LeEco is also one of the biggest online video companies in its homeland, and in fact its name used to be LeTV - so acquiring a maker of TV sets isn't incredibly surprising.

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