Felix Tao still remembers how thrilled he was to receive one of his biggest orders: a Rmb1.6m ($244,000) deal to supply phone parts to Le Mobile, the mobile phone subsidiary of tech conglomerate LeEco.
Almost two years later, however, the young supplier from the coastal province of Shandong says he is still waiting to be paid. “LeEco keeps telling us to give them some time. We have heard that line so many times that we have it memorised,” he says.
The unravelling of LeEco, the tech group that once aimed to be the Tesla and Netflix of China, has devolved into a chaotic scramble for cash, providing a case study case into the shakiness of the country’s nascent corporate bankruptcy regime.