I’ve been thinking about Luckin Coffee, which was a big story a few years ago in China. It was a digital upstart taking on giant Starbucks. It was Jack Ma’s “new retail” applied to retail coffee. It was a digital innovator. Blah, blah, blah. It was mostly a lot of hype. And the company crashed […]
In Part 1, I argued that Starbucks China most interesting competitor is not Luckin Coffee. It is HeyTea, an upscale Starbucks-type business focused on tea (something Chinese consumers really, really like). And to their credit, HeyTea appears to be mostly focusing not on digital innovation but on product development and continually thrilling their customers. Which […]
China / Asia is usually the most dynamic frontier for retail – and especially when it integrates with ecommerce. This is the result of a really big market and never-ending hyper-competition. It means there is always frantic innovating just to stay in the game. It’s a space I generally avoid because of the degree of […]
A couple of topics for today. About how all business begins and ends with the customer.HeyTea and Why You Have to Thrill Your Customers.There was an interesting article last week about retail tea company HeyTea – and their rumored funding round at a price of 16B RMB ($280M). HeyTea is a popular and growing chain […]
Jeffrey Towson discusses what Starbucks China could have done to respond to the rise of Luckin Coffee. He argues that Starbucks should have focused on its strengths, such as its brand and its loyalty program, and that it should have been more aggressive in expanding its store network. He also notes that Starbucks could have learned from Luckin’s innovative marketing and pricing strategies.
The Luckin Coffee SEC filing is out. So we can finally see their numbers. This is Part 2 of what I think is being misunderstood about Luckin. Part 1 is here. #5: Luckin is not really about increasing mass-market coffee consumption in China. Luckin is engaged in a Herculean effort to get Chinese to drink […]
So Luckin has filed for an IPO and we finally got to see their numbers. And yes, there are red flags all over the place. Big operating losses, funky corporate structures, speculative revenue growth and so on. And this is not uncommon in a tech / internet ipo. But I don’t recall ever seeing this […]
The Luckin vs. Starbucks fight is accelerating, both in terms of stores opened and hype. Luckin has IPO’d. And Tim Horton’s is jumping into the China coffee biz. What is going on? Why is there so much activity in the previously sleepy business of Chinese retail coffee? Recall, a similar thing happened in bike-sharing […]
From one of my standard talks in 2018 (since retired). This is about bike-sharing, mobility and super-apps. See below. Youtube link is here. Other parts of talk are below: Part 1: What is the Engine of Chinese Bike-Sharing? Part 2: Give Consumers Exactly What They Want Part 3: In Digital China, Re-Imagine Operations ASAP Part […]
I had an awesome 2 days behind the scenes with Alibaba at Singles’ Day 2018. I got to attend the gala, visit companies and talk with management – all in the midst of the world’s biggest spending frenzy. Plus I got to meet some other “global influencers”, most of whom I had been reading for […]