Shares of Luckin Coffee (NASDAQ: LK), as of this writing, are up roughly 185% from the IPO price of $17 that the company set in May 2019, largely due to the substantial growth the company has shown over the past several months. At the end of December, the Chinese company operated 4,507 locations in China. That was up from 2,963 at the end of June and topped the more than 4,100 locations Starbucks has in China.
Average per-person coffee consumption in China is estimated to be five cups per year, compared 400 cups in the U.S. The potential to sell more and more java to Chinese customers, in particular the country's 400 million millennials, has Luckin and Starbucks expanding in the country.
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