This Chinese company is going to beat Xiaomi to the punch in America

LeTV’s phone was launched earlier this year in China.

Over the past few years, China has seen an explosion of domestic smartphone brands. Most have followed more or less in the footsteps of Xiaomi, selling their products online and aiming squarely at China’s growing urban middle class. Letv may be the most successful example; the video streaming company has rapidly branched out into everything from smartphones and smart TVs to electric cars over the past few years. And all that hardware is selling pretty well. Recently, Letv sold more than 500,000 smartphones and more than 350,000 smart TVs in a single day as part of a sales event on its Lemall online store.

But Letv’s ambition is to be far more than a domestic smartphone brand. Unlike Xiaomi, which has been slow to expand to Western countries and still doesn’t sell any of its smartphones or smart TVs there, Letv is not hesitant about plunging into the US market. Later this fall, the company will launch its Lemall online shop in the United States.

Adapting to the market

Letv’s Brian Hui

The US market is quite different from China, but Brian Hui – senior VP of Lemall International – told Tech in Asia that the company isn’t worried about the transition. “Our approach to customer service is that we always consider specific audiences’ needs and adapt accordingly,” said Brian. But that clearly doesn’t mean major adaptations. “We’re a global company that doesn’t distinguish between our US and Chinese consumers, and are committed to delivering a high-quality, seamless experiences across all of our devices and platforms, regardless of location,” he told me.

Letv already has a bit of a foothold in the US – its film production arm operates there and it has based its electric car team out of Silicon Valley. But Letv’s biggest challenge is still likely to be branding. Unlike in China, where the company is virtually a household name thanks to its popular video streaming site and app, very few people in the US have heard of Letv. And the fact that the company is from China doesn’t help – China’s brand isn’t as bad as it was in the US a few years ago, but many American consumers are still suspicious that Chinese tech products may be poorly made, security-compromised, or both.

Brian Hui says that Letv prefers to focus on what it can control: the products themselves. But it does know there may be difficulties. “Because we are new to the US market, we’re aware there there is a learning curve,” he said. “Over the past year, we’ve done a lot of work to grow an elite and agile team in the US, to carry out what we call our tri-city strategy: implementation and application in Beijing, technology and innovation in Silicon Valley, and media and entertainment in Los Angeles. In the process, we’ve been adapting and fine-tuning our US efforts to address the needs of our audiences.”

The first step

Letv clearly doesn’t expect the kinds of crazy flash sales numbers it has put up in China to be repeated when Lemall launches in the US. “Really, the launch of Lemall is just an important first step for us to establish our US presence,” Brian told me. Once the US operation is up and running, Letv will be able to gather valuable feedback it can use to further accelerate its American expansion. The company wouldn’t share specific sales targets for its first year in the US, although Brian did say: “We’re confident we can achieve the results we want.”

Those results won’t just be coming from Letv’s own ecommerce site, either. Well aware that some consumers prefer to buy from larger ecommerce vendors, Letv has already listed its products on major ecommerce sites like JD and Tmall in China, and it will do the same in the US. Does that mean that you’ll be able to buy a Letv phone on Amazon? Brian wouldn’t share any specific partners. “We’re exploring all of our options in order to get Letv products into the hands of consumers,” Brian said. “At the end of the day, our products will be available wherever our consumers are, and we want to make sure that they’re being taken care of.”

Blazing new ground

Hardware giants like Huawei and ZTE have long taken the US market seriously, of course. But Letv may be the first major Chinese tech firm to really bring the Chinese-internet-companies-doing-hardware trend to America. Despite having entered the smartphone game after Xiaomi, Letv looks like it’s planning to beat Lei Jun’s company – and its other domestic competitors – by expanding globally faster and more aggressively.

That strategy is not without risk. Especially when it comes to the US, there are good reasons that many Chinese smartphone firms have hesitated to enter the market. But with American telecoms finally moving away from the carrier subsidy smartphone sales model – Verizon, the US’s largest carrier, just ditched it last month – this just might be the perfect moment for Letv to take on the American smartphone market.