Luckin Coffee

Luckin Coffee Inc. (Chinese: 瑞幸咖啡; pinyin: Ruìxìng Kāfēi) is a Chinese coffee company and coffeehouse chain founded in Beijing in 2017. In the first half of 2026, Luckin had 35,000 stores globally. The company operates shops, stores, and kiosks that offer coffee, tea, and food, generally at lower prices than their competitors. Purchases can only be made using an online app. Luckin is headquartered in Xiamen, Fujian. The company has expanded rapidly since its founding, and by 2019, its stores outnumbered Starbucks locations in China. 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, Luckin revealed that it had inflated its 2019 sales revenue by up to US$310 million. This resulted in its stock price crashing and several executives being fired. Trading was suspended, and the company was delisted from NASDAQ on 29 June 2020. Luckin filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy in the US in February 2021. In December 2021, the company received court approval from a federal judge in Manhattan to restructure $460M worth of 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 had emerged from bankruptcy after completing its financial restructuring under United States Code, and that it had replaced most of its top management, who were held accountable for the earlier fraud.