Coolpad Group's top shareholder sells stake for $103m

Coolpad Group Limited, LeEco's smartphone affiliate, said its major shareholder Leview Mobile HK Limited had sold HK$807.7 million ($103 million) worth of shares at HK$0.9 per sale share in cash, reducing its stake to 10.95 percent from 28.78 percent.

Leview Mobile, a subsidiary of Leshi Internet Information & Technology Corp incorporated in 2015, has sold 897.4 million shares, or 17.83 percent of Coolpad Group, to Power Sun Ventures Limited, making the latter the single largest shareholder, Coolpad Group announced on its official website Thursday.

Leview Mobile remains the second-largest share holder of Coolpad, followed by Data Dreamland Holding Limited with 9.2 percent of the company's shares.

Besides the information that Power Sun Ventures Limited is a company incorporated in British Virgin Islands, no more details were revealed by Coolpad on its new major shareholder.

LeEco became the single largest shareholder of Chinese smartphone maker Coolpad Group to boost subscriptions and smartphone sales in June 2016.

Jia Yueting became chairman of Coolpad Group on Aug 5, 2016 and resigned in November the following year, after the Shanghai High People's Court froze assets worth 1.24 billion yuan owned by Jia and his wife Gan Wei.

Jia was placed on a national list of debt defaulters and got orders from the Beijing branch of the China Securities Regulatory Commission to return to China from the US before Dec 31 at the end of 2017.

Jia defied orders to return and continued to stay in the US, claiming he had to work on his electric car startup. He asked his wife Gan Wei and his brother Jia Yuemin to help settle financial woes, articulating this in a statement posted in January on Gan Wei's Sina Weibo account, China's Twitter-like social media.

Gan, who returned to China on New Year's Eve, said she would meet creditors to resolve the debt problems and confirmed Jia owed 6.9 billion yuan ($1 billion) on loans connected to pledged shares, and has paid 1.7 billion yuan toward interest on same since 2014, in a post on her Sina Weibo account.

The current price of Coolpad Group per share is HK$0.72, according to the latest data from Hong Kong Stock Exchange.