The financial troubles bedeviling the innovative Chinese company LeEco may have taken its first casualty and it turns out to be LeEco’s founder and CEO, Jia Yueting. According to a stock exchange filing, Jia Yueting will step down as CEO of one of LeEco’s holding companies, Leshi Internet Information & Technology Corp Beijing. The filing also revealed that the company’s finance chief will also be eased out and that the former CEO will still retain his position as chairman.

Leshi was founded by Jia Yueting in Beijing in 2004 and is reputed as the first streaming video company in China to go public. Jia later founded Leshi Holding as a sister company of Letv to provide media content and products that linked to its services. Both Letv services and Leshi products were marketed internationally under the Letv name until January 2016, when media services began under the Le.com name and electronics products were labeled LeEco.

Information made available in the Stock exchange filing also include that Jia will remain as chairman and woulf focus on corporate governance, strategic planning and core product innovation. His former role as CEO will be taken over by longtime Lenovo executive Liang Jun, who joined Leshi as an executive in 2012. The announcement includes that Yang Lijie would resign as chief financial officer due to personal reasons and his position will be taken over by Zhang Wei, who was formerly the company’s China CFO.

Read Also: LeEco Revenue Up During First Quarter of 2017 In Spite of Troubles

LeEco’s financial troubles began last year after an aggressive expansion drive which saw the company enter the US market and also India. The company had tried to seek billions of dollars in fresh funding and also shed some of its libilities, reducing staff and abandoning a deal to buy Vizio, a U.S. TV maker. The financial difficulties may also be unconnected with the LeSEE electric car project which LeEco was developing with Faraday Future and is believed to have gulped huge sums.

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Chinese smartphone maker LeEco, formerly known as LeTV will start selling phones, televisions and other gadgets in the US market sometime soon, an internal memo from Jia Yueting LeEco’s CEO indicates.

This is coming on the heels of news that the Beijing-based online video company, who runs a business model which is similar to American company NetFlix’s, has completed the acquisition of a 50-acre development site in the Silicon Valley from internet giant Yahoo. It hopes to build its North America headquarters on the property to accommodate thousands of staffs.

According to the internal memo, billionaire-owner Jia Yueting informed staffs that LeEco is preparing for an official launch of its product in the US market within the next three months.  The company, which made its start in online video streaming, is looking to sell their own music content, smartphones, Smart TVs and video streaming services in the United States.

LeEco is virtually unknown in the U.S, even though it’s been a significant player in China for some time. Originally launched in 2004 as an online video service, it quickly became one of the largest video platforms in the country, where it now streams a catalog of some 5,000 movies and 100,000 TV show episodes.

The company also started selling Smart TVs and streaming boxes, and last year, LeEco which still carry the LeTV brand in its products, also began selling smartphones in China.

The company is poised to take on giants Apple and Tesla in the video streaming market with entertainment content made by its movie-production unit Le Vision Pictures and local partners.

Already, LeEco has a film under production titled The Great Wall, a story centered on the construction of the Great Wall of China and strategically, the film stars Hollywood A-list actor Matt Damon.

Another crucial part of LeEco’s foray into the US market is Faraday Future, an electric-car start up that it entered into partnership with. LeEco funds the start-up and the company plans to set up a research lab in the Silicon Valley headquarters where it hopes to explore technologies in artificial intelligence, autonomous driving and virtual reality, according to the memo.

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