Luckin Coffee eyes Gulf expansion after $1 billion Mubadala investment

SINGAPORE — Luckin Coffee is once again weighing an entry into Persian Gulf markets after securing backing from Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund Mubadala.

Luckin’s senior management is considering expanding into the Gulf countries, Chairman David Li told CNBC in an exclusive interview on Monday. Li is the co-founder and CEO of private equity firm Centurium Capital, the controlling shareholder of China-based Luckin.

“There are other markets we are currently looking at [and] potentially entering into regions like Gulf countries,” Li said.

Mubadala has become a direct investor in Luckin after a $1 billion joint investment with Centurium in early September, with neither side disclosing the respective stake size. The $385 billion sovereign fund has invested more than $20 billion in China, including into e-commerce giant Shein and real estate developer Dalian Wanda’s shopping malls business.

Luckin had in 2019 planned to open shops in the Middle East and India, but that never came to fruition. The company was embroiled in an accounting scandal six years ago that found its former executives had fabricated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, leading to its filing for bankruptcy in the U.S., delisting from Nasdaq, and feeding into broadening U.S. scrutiny of Chinese companies’ stock listings.

The appeal of expanding into the Gulf lies in stable, high-frequency coffee demand and a growing preference for low-sugar, health-oriented drinks, Luckin CEO Jinyi Guo told CNBC separately on Monday

With Centurium’s backing, Luckin has engineered a sharp turnaround and surpassed Starbucks as China’s biggest coffee chain by sales. The Beijing-based private equity firm has also been pushing further into coffee after acquiring premium coffee brand Blue Bottle Coffee in April from Nestlé for reportedly less than $400 million.

Luckin’s shares, still trading over-the-counter in a less-regulated exchange, now value the company at roughly $9.6 billion. Starbucks valued its China business at more than $13 billion in a deal last November that sold its controlling stake to Boyu Capital, a private equity firm based in Beijing.

Luckin is “actively pushing the process of relisting on a U.S. mainboard,” Guo said last year at a government-hosted event in the southeastern city of Xiamen, where Luckin is headquartered. The company still needs Chinese regulators’ approval for relisting and has since indicated that it has no clear timeline.

The coffee chain’s turnaround has drawn a lengthening list of institutional backers. Temasek disclosed a 6.4% stake in Luckin in a May regulatory filing and expressed confidence in the leadership’s ability to realize growth. The chain is continuing to build out its presence in Singapore and Malaysia, its two other Asian markets.

Still, its overseas growth remains modest next to Luckin’s China scale. The chain runs 23 stores in New York City about a year after its U.S. debut, 150 in Malaysia, and 100 in Singapore, compared to the more than 36,000 stores in mainland China and Hong Kong combined.

In the second quarter, Luckin’s revenue grew 28.5% to 15.9 billion yuan, or $2.34 billion, with average monthly transacting customers increasing 23% to 112.7 million, as the chain opened 2,714 net new stores in the period.