SAN JOSE — Chinese consumer electronics giant LeEco has curtailed its once-ambitious expansion plans for the United States, slashing hundreds of jobs, including many in San Jose.

Saddled by a cash crunch, the company said in a prepared release Tuesday that it is responding with “a significant restructuring and streamlining of our business, operations and workforce.”

Referring to the restructuring, LeEco said, “This will impact approximately 325 people in the U.S.”

LeEco employees could be seen outside the company’s North San Jose head offices on Tuesday talking on cellphones and with each other. One woman, wearing a LeEco identification tag, was in tears as she described some of the activity inside the offices.

“People are saying goodbye to each other,” she told this newspaper.

The company is closing its San Diego offices. It’s expected to maintain a slimmed-down presence in San Jose.

LeEco had about 300 to 400 employees in its San Jose offices as of last week, according to another employee who didn’t want to give his name.

“The challenges with raising new capital have made it difficult in the past few months to support all of our business’ priorities,” LeEco said. “As a result, the capital we do have will have to be highly focused.”

In 2016, LeEco announced plans to create a vast campus in Santa Clara with the grand name EcoWorld, where 12,000 people would work and rival in size and scope to the Apple spaceship headquarters in Cupertino. LeEco scuttled those plans for a 50-acre campus due to its cash crunch.

“This was inevitable,” said one LeEco employee on Tuesday, just after he was told he had lost his job with the reeling company. “LeEco tried to micromanage a tech company from thousands of miles away in China. You just can’t run a Silicon Valley company that way.”

LeEco in 2016 sketched a vision of interconnected and intelligent screens in home TV sets, in cars and on phones, suggesting it could create services to run on, and to connect, its devices. The idea was to create a seamless and connected set of networks among many devices.

“We believe that our vision to remove the barriers between screens for consumers is right,” LeEco said. “Because we can’t access the capital needed at this time, we will need to take a phased approach to the U.S. market.”

In July 2016, LeEco said it would buy Vizio for $2 billion, but by April of this year, LeEco abandoned the purchase amid a worsening cash crunch. Financing deals imploded. Then came word Tuesday that it would lay off the vast majority of its U.S. workforce.

LeEco insisted Tuesday that it remains committed to a presence in the United States, despite its setbacks.

“We are committed to the U.S. and supporting our existing consumers,” LeEco stated. “To further demonstrate this, last week we finalized on-shoring our customer care call center in order to enhance the customer experience for our U.S. consumers.”

Still, it appears that LeEco is focusing on a particular segment of the U.S. market at present.

“Our goal is to continue to gain momentum,” LeEco said. “In the past few months, we have gained a large foothold in Chinese-speaking households in the U.S. by offering tailor-made products and content for this community.”