Luckin Coffee

Luckin Coffee Inc. (Chinese: 瑞幸咖啡; pinyin: Ruìxìng Kāfēi) is a Chinese coffee company and coffeehouse chain. It was founded in Beijing in 2017. As of March 2023, it managed 9,351 stores which included 6,310 self-operated stores and 3,041 partnership stores. Monthly active customer numbers reached 500 million in June 2022. On 18 July 2024, the total Luckin coffee store number reached 20,000. The company operates shops, stores, and kiosks that offer coffee, tea, and food. Customers need to download an app to order and pay for drinks online. Luckin is currently headquartered in Xiamen. Luckin Coffee quickly expanded over the years and outnumbered the number of Starbucks stores in China by 2019.

In January 2020, short-seller Carson Block and his firm Muddy Waters Research published an anonymous 89-page investigative report on Twitter, claiming that Luckin Coffee had falsified financial and operational figures; the company denied the allegations. In April 2020, however, the company revealed that it had inflated its 2019 sales revenue by up to US$310 million. This resulted in the stock price crashing and several executives being fired. Trading was suspended and the company was delisted from NASDAQ on 29 June 2020. The company filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy in the US in February 2021. In December 2021, Luckin Coffee received court approval from a federal judge in Manhattan to restructure $460M worth of its debt and to settle a number of class-action lawsuits against it over the fabricated sales figures. In 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that the company has emerged from bankruptcy after completing the restructuring of its financial debt under United States Code, and also replaced most of its top management who were held accountable for the earlier fraud.