Update: Nevermind! LeEco's purchase of Vizio Nevermind! LeEco's purchase of Vizio has been cancelled.

At a Los Angeles press conference, TV and sound bar manufacturer Vizio announced that it will be acquired by Chinese electronics firm LeEco for $2 billion. The Tuesday event included a lengthy statement from company founder and CEO William Wang, who recalled the Irvine, California, TV manufacturer's ten-year history before ironically calling the company's success story "an American dream."

"I have mixed feelings," Wang admitted before handing the microphone back to Vizio's new owners. "As the owner and father of Vizio, I'm really reluctant to let it go. But as a CEO and chairman, I know this is the right decision to make for my hardworking employees and loyal shareholders."

Wang will still be connected to Vizio, however, by becoming chairman and CEO of Inscape, a separate business that will carry Vizio's controversial torch of mining TV viewers' data for advertising and other data-driven services. Wang will be a 51-percent stakeholder in Inscape, with LeEco owning the other 49 percent and licensing Inscape's offerings for Vizio products for 10 years. The deal is still pending regulatory approval, LeEco notes, and the Chinese company may pay an additional $250 million to Vizio and its shareholders based on sales performance in the years to come.





This acquisition marks LeEco's second major push into Western markets after company Chairman Jia Yueting pushed to open a major car-manufacturing plant for his other company, Faraday Futures, in Nevada. LeEco operates all kinds of technology-related companies in China, and most of them start with a "Le" prefix. In fact, the Chinese company's presentation at the Vizio event contained so many far-reaching "Le"-branded dabblings—everything from cloud services to smartphones to home product delivery to TV- and film-production companies—that it almost looked like a comedic Hooli segment from the HBO series Silicon Valley.