Open 23 stores in a single day! Luckin Coffee surpasses 30,000 stores, with the full-scale dividend of growth now erupting.

Ask AI · How Luckin Coffee achieves a breakthrough in store expansion amid delisting risk?

Produced by | China Interview Network

Reviewed by | Li Xiaoyan

Recently, Luckin Coffee released its 2025 full-year financial report, and a set of figures outlines a milestone for China’s café chains: total annual revenue nears 49.3 billion yuan, up 43% year over year; the total number of stores surpasses 31,000, with a net addition of 8,708 stores over the year; and cumulative transaction customers exceed 450 million. As a brand that once went through a delisting crisis and returned to the right track by relying on restructuring and refined operations, Luckin confirms the enormous potential of China’s fresh-brew coffee market through double-digit growth in both scale and revenue, and it has also cemented its absolute leading position in the industry. Although profits in the fourth quarter showed temporary fluctuations, viewed from the long-term development perspective, this is a short-term adjustment resulting from rapid expansion combined with external environmental factors—not a weakening of fundamentals. Behind 30,000 stores lies Luckin’s deep control over the supply chain, digitization, and user mindshare. It is also the best annotation of the process of making coffee more accessible and more mainstream across China.

Thirty thousand stores are not only a breakthrough in numbers, but also a concentrated reflection of how mature Luckin’s business model has become. In 2025, Luckin expanded at a pace of more than 23 new stores per day, forming high-density coverage across more than 300 cities nationwide. From top-tier core business districts to lower-tier county-level markets, it built a terminal network that competitors find difficult to replicate. This scale not only helped Luckin surpass Starbucks China to become the coffee brand with the most stores in a single market globally, but it also brought clear scale benefits: operating profit for the full year reached 5.073 billion yuan, up 42.1%; operating margin was maintained at 10.3%. Non-GAAP operating profit was 5.646 billion yuan, up 43.5%, with profitability quality staying steady. As self-operated stores serve as the core pillar of profit, full-year revenue from self-operated stores was 36.243 billion yuan, up 41.6%. Even in the fourth quarter, facing external cost pressure, the operating profit margin of self-operated stores still remained at 15%, demonstrating a strong per-store profit base.

The continuous expansion of the user base is Luckin’s most solid growth engine. In 2025, Luckin added more than 110 million transaction users, bringing cumulative users to over 450 million. For a time, the average number of monthly transaction customers stayed above 100 million for five consecutive months. Annual sales volume of fresh-brew beverages surpassed 4.1 billion cups, and per-capita consumption frequency steadily increased. Against the backdrop of a retreat from the price war and consumers returning to rationality, such a massive user base that keeps growing implies that Luckin has already completed the leap from “attracting customers through low prices” to “habituation.” Consumers’ recognition of the brand is no longer limited to low prices; it has shifted toward stable quality, convenient availability, and continuous product innovation. This user-mindshare accumulation is the core confidence behind Luckin’s ability to respond to industry competition and withstand short-term profit pressure, and it is also a wall that other new entrants can hardly catch up with in the short term.

Fourth-quarter profit pressure is, in essence, the result of external environmental disturbances and certain phased strategic choices, not a decline in operating capability. The financial report shows that in the fourth quarter of 2025, Luckin’s net profit fell 39.1% year over year. The core cause was a sharp increase in delivery costs: delivery fees were 1.63 billion yuan in the quarter, up 94.5% year over year, and delivery fees totaled 6.88 billion yuan for the full year, up 143.8% year over year. This surge in spending stems from the subsidy war for delivery launched by Meituan, JD, and Ele.me. To maintain market share and user activity, Luckin deeply participated in platform promotions. Orders grew explosively, while rigid delivery costs rose in parallel. However, this cost pressure is clearly phased: as platform subsidy strategies return to rationality, the structure of delivery orders will gradually tilt toward self-pickup, and the erosion of profits by delivery fees will be significantly alleviated. Luckin’s management has already stated that the cup-volume mix returning to self-pickup will take time; in 2026, same-store sales and profits may see phased fluctuations, but that will be within the company’s expectations—reflecting the company’s proactive control over operating cadence.

As store expansion enters a stage of competition within the existing market, and same-store growth slows temporarily, this is a normal outcome of industry maturity—not “involution and mutual waste.” Estimates by Huayuan Securities show that the theoretical saturation point for domestic coffee stores is about 39,000. With Luckin currently at about 31,000 stores, there is still considerable room for compliant incremental growth. In the fourth quarter, same-store sales growth for self-operated stores fell to 1.2%. More than anything, it results from multiple overlapping factors such as a high base, seasonality, and platform strategies. In the first three quarters, this metric was 8.1%, 13.4%, and 14.4% respectively, and full-year same-store growth remains steady. As new store placement shifts from “high-density抢占 (to occupy aggressively)” to “fine-mapped supplementation (to fill gaps precisely),” the store-diversion effect will gradually weaken, and the operating efficiency of older stores will continue to improve. More importantly, Luckin’s expansion has long upgraded from “quantity-driven” to “quality-driven.” The growth rate of partner-operated stores has remained at a 40.2% compound growth rate. A light-asset model lowers expansion costs and increases the profitability leverage of the overall network.

With intensifying industry competition, Luckin’s core advantages have long surpassed the level of pricing and moved toward system-wide, end-to-end competition. Brands such as Luckin Coffee and Kudi enter with low prices, while tea beverage brands expand across categories—seemingly increasing the围剿. In reality, it highlights Luckin’s leading position in the industry. Luckin’s competitiveness is rooted in its vertically integrated supply chain system: global direct procurement secures high-quality coffee bean resources from Brazil, Ethiopia, and Yunnan. It builds its own roasting facilities with an annual production capacity of 155,000 tons, continuously optimizing the proportion of raw material costs. Specialty raw-material layouts such as Indonesia’s exclusive fresh coconut island sourcing and Guangxi’s jasmine-growing regions provide a stable and low-cost supply for product innovation. Digital capabilities run through the entire operating process—from ordering, to preparation, to logistics dispatch—allowing a 30,000-store network to achieve efficient coordination, with operating cost per cup continuing to decline. These three layers of barriers—supply chain plus digitization plus store network—help Luckin break out of the “price war” first, moving into higher-level competition in brand mindshare, customer experience, and emotional value.

The exploration of overseas markets is a necessary attempt for Luckin to move from being a China market leader to a global brand, swapping short-term investment for long-term space. In New York, stores entered the market with an introductory discount price of $1.99. In Singapore, early-stage investment exceeded revenue; in essence, this is a normal cost for cultivating a new market. The high labor and compliance costs in the United States are a common challenge for all café chain brands expanding abroad, not something unique to Luckin. Luckin, having verified successful supply chain integration, standardized operations, and digitized management capabilities at home, is gradually migrating those capabilities overseas. Short-term losses are the necessary investment for brand landing and user education. As overseas store networks gradually take shape and supply chain localization and adaptation improve, overseas business will shift from an investment phase to a contribution phase, becoming Luckin’s new growth curve.

Looking back on Luckin’s development journey—from financial fraud and delisting to rebirth in the over-the-counter market, from expanding to 10,000 stores to being crowned with 30,000—Luckin used five years to accomplish self-rescue and industry disruption. The 2025 financial report reflects both the glory of scale breakthroughs and rational adjustments to short-term profit fluctuations, which is exactly the real portrait of a mature enterprise: not blindly chasing short-term profit margins, but instead laying out scale, users, the supply chain, and globalization from a long-term perspective to build a foundation for growth in the next phase.

China’s coffee market is still in a golden period of rising penetration. As an industry leader, Luckin takes on the role of cultivating the market, defining standards, and driving industrial upgrades. Thirty thousand stores are not the endpoint, but a new starting line: as delivery costs return to a reasonable level, store operations become increasingly refined, the product structure upgrades, and the overseas market gradually breaks through, Luckin’s profit elasticity will be released step by step. Short-term profit volatility will not change the long-term growth trend; phased operating challenges cannot outweigh the advantages of a system-wide competitive framework.

From one cup of coffee to an entire industry—from China to a global layout—Luckin has proven, with 30,000 stores, the scalability capability and resilient growth power of Chinese café chain brands. In the future, as competition in the industry returns to its true nature, Luckin will continue to lead China’s coffee industry toward maturity by leveraging multiple layers of barriers—its supply chain, digitization, users, and brand mindshare—while also providing a China-style innovation sample for global chain restaurant brands.