Note sull'episodio
Luckin Coffee was founded in Beijing in October 2017 and opened its first shops in Beijing and Shanghai in January 2018, cashless, app-only, and heavily discounted, spending about three times what it earned to buy growth like a software startup. A $200 million Series A in July 2018 brought in Centurium Capital and GIC, and by October 2018 Luckin had 1,300 stores, passing Costa Coffee as China's second biggest coffee brand. It partnered with Tencent and listed on Nasdaq in May 2019 at $17 a share. In January 2020 it raised more than $1.2 billion, including a $400 million convertible bond, and weeks later, on January 31, short seller Carson Block's Muddy Waters Research posted an anonymous 89-page report alleging the numbers were fake.
The report rested on 11,200 hours of storefront video shot by gig workers who counted cups leaving stores. On April 2, 2020, Luckin admitted its chief operating officer had fabricated about $310 million in 2019 sales through shell companies posing as bulk voucher buyers. The stock fell more than 80 percent, trading was halted, Nasdaq delisted it, and Luckin filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy in New York in early 2021 and paid $180 million to settle SEC fraud charges. It emerged in March 2022 under Centurium with a $240 million injection and CEO Jinyi Guo, then expanded to Singapore in 2023, Malaysia in 2024, and Manhattan in July 2025.
- The report claimed items sold per store were inflated by up to 88 percent in the fourth quarter of 2019.
- Goldman Sachs seized and sold the chairman's shares after he defaulted on a $518 million margin loan.
- Luckin's $400 million convertible bonds traded as low as 10 cents on the dollar after the admission.
- Revenue reached $1.22 billion in the first quarter of 2025, and the chain passed 35,000 locations by mid-2026.
- In February 2026 its 30,000th store opened as an Origin flagship in Shenzhen, and in March it was reported to have bought Blue Bottle's cafe business from Nestlé.