The Luckin Coffee scandal carries the flavor of a familiar all-American scam: a high-flying Nasdaq stock with a technology hook collapses after accounting fraud is exposed. But Luckin is a Chinese company — and that highlights a unique set of risks too often ignored by U.S. investors.
These risks will make it very hard for the out-of-luck investors to recover significant sums from Luckin, which had been taking on Starbucks in China. Luckin’s shares plunged more than 90 percent after the company admitted to fabricating $300 million in revenue last year, and its stock has been halted for weeks.
Let’s start with Luckin’s ownership structure. The company listed on Nasdaq in May 2019 with a $651 million initial public offering, and followed that up with a $378 million secondary offering in January. Big investors like Blackrock jumped in.
But investors in Luckin likely failed to understand that they were not buying a piece of the company that sells lattes a
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