Luckin Coffee plans to raise over $500M in US IPO

Luckin Coffee, the ambitious Chinese upstart that’s going after Starbucks, could raise nearly $600 million from its upcoming IPO. That’s according to a price range released by the Chinese startup.

In a new filing, Luckin said it plans to sell 30 million shares at an initial range of $15-$17. That gives an estimated raise of $450 million to $510 million, but it could be bumped up if underwriters take up the additional allocation of 4.5 million shares. So, as a grand total, the listing could raise $586.5 million if the full offering is bought at the top of the range.

The company will list on the Nasdaq as ‘LK.’

Luckin filed to go public last month, just weeks after it closed a $150 million Series B+ funding round led by New York private equity firm Blackrock, which interestingly holds a 6.58 percent stake in Starbucks. The deal valued Luckin at $2.9 billion and it took the three-year-old company to $550 million raised from investors to date.

The company has burned through incredible amounts of cash as it tries to quickly build a brand that can rival Starbucks, and the presence that the U.S. firm has built over the last 20 years in China. Through aggressive promotions and coupons, the company posted a $475 million loss in 2018, its only full year of business to date, with $125 million in revenue. For the first quarter of 2019, it carded an $85 million loss with total sales of $71 million.

Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson has been vocally dismissive of the viability of that strategy of “heavy, heavy discounts.”

“We’re deploying capital and building 600 new stores per year. [We’re] generating the return on invested capital that we believe is sustainable to continue to build new stores at this rate for many years to come,” he told CNBC in a recent interview.

Starbucks claims 30,000 stores worldwide. It has been in China for 20 years and it is aiming to reach 6,000 stores in the country by 2022. Luckin, fuelled by that VC money, has quickly scaled to reach 2,370 locations in under two years with plans to add a further 2,500 this year. That would see it overtake Starbucks — which has 3,600 stores across 150 Chinese cities — although that a metric gives a distorted view since Luckin specializes in digital orders and on-demand delivery. That’s in contrast to the retail model operated by Starbucks.