Luckin Coffee wants to expand into the Middle East. The same Luckin Coffee that collapsed in a $300 million accounting fraud six years ago. The same company that got delisted from Nasdaq for lying about basically everything. That Luckin Coffee now has sovereign wealth funds lining up to bankroll its desert expansion.
The chairman told CNBC they're weighing a push into Middle East markets. Weighing. Like they're doing calculus. Like there's a decision tree involved beyond "will someone give us money" and "yes they will."
Sovereign wealth funds in both the Middle East and Southeast Asia are backing this move. Governments are writing checks to a company that needed a complete management overhaul after systematically fabricating sales data. The technical setup here is pristine if you ignore everything that happened before 2021.
They're also deepening their foothold in Southeast Asia because apparently one region of coffee shops wasn't enough. Luckin operates on the tried-and-true business model of opening thousands of locations and hoping the chart goes up. Retail traders see "expansion" and "sovereign wealth" in the same sentence and start computing their position size.
The Middle East coffee market must be incredibly underserved. Can't get a decent cup anywhere between Dubai and Riyadh unless you count the seventy-three Starbucks per capita. Luckin saw that gap in the market and said we should definitely fly in there with our baggage.
Chart says oversold on the hourly. Fundamentals say the company's previous leadership made up revenue for two straight years. Sovereign wealth funds say here's several million dollars. The technical analyst says none of this matters because coffee beans don't care about your feelings, but dead companies usually stay dead longer than six years.
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