China: Le Sports valued at nearly €3bn after a fundraising of 8 billion yuan (€1.1bn)

Le Sports, the sports portal of LeEco, the Chinese technologies and digital content company, conducted a second round of fundraising of 8 billion yuan (€1.1bn) which now values the streaming platform at 21.5 billion yuan (€2.96bn), announced Jia Yueting, the CEO of LeEco, on 27/03/2016. Le Sports, previously called LeTV, had made a first round of fundraising of 800 million yuan on 13/05/2015, with a group of investors including the Chinese conglomerate Wanda Group and the Chinese group e-commerce Alibaba.

"We didn’t plan to raise this much. We initially aimed for only 3bn yuan. The market enthusiasm was too high and pushed up the scale to 5bn. But even that couldn’t stop (investor demand)... We are under a lot of pressure because it’s about relationships. Many of them are strategic investors (of the whole LeEco group), not just financial investors," said Liu Hong, co-founder and vice-chairman of LeEco, to the website FinanceAsia on 27/03/2016.

Over thirty investors were involved in the fundraising, including the HNA Capital group, a private equity fund that may have obtained a stake…