Can Cotti Coffee repeat Luckin with this coffee knowledge team?
Cotti Coffee (Tianjin) Co., Ltd. has changed its legal representative, with former Luckin Coffee CEO Qian Zhiya replacing Wang Baiyin, Lu Zhengyao's Peking University classmate. Qian also holds the executive director and manager roles. The company was registered in May 2022 with US$100 million in capital and is wholly owned by MAIN MARVEL LIMITED.
Qian Zhiya, born in 1976, graduated from Wuhan Textile University and later earned a Peking University EMBA. She worked at UCAR Inc. and CAR Inc. before founding and leading Luckin Coffee through its rapid listing. Her return alongside Lu Zhengyao puts the pair back into a crowded coffee market, where duplicating Luckin-style growth remains an open question for anyone following China's coffee knowledge and cafe fair coffee trends.
Cotti Coffee (Tianjin) Co., Ltd. recently completed a change of legal representative, with Luckin Coffee founder Qian Zhiya taking over the role from Wang Baiyin, while also serving as executive director and manager. The mentor-apprentice relationship between Qian Zhiya and Lu Zhengyao can be traced back to the CAR Inc. period. She single-handedly founded Luckin Coffee and drove its lightning-fast IPO in 18 months, later leaving amid a financial fraud scandal. Now the two have joined forces once again to charge back into the coffee track. Given an increasingly fierce competitive market environment, whether Cotti can replicate Luckin-style growth is worth continued attention.
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According to the latest business registration information from Tianyancha, the legal representative position of Cotti Coffee (Tianjin) Co., Ltd. has changed. Wang Baiyin, Lu Zhengyao's Peking University classmate and former chairman of Luckin Coffee, no longer holds the position. Taking over is Qian Zhiya, a former subordinate highly regarded by Lu Zhengyao and former CEO of Luckin Coffee.
Public records show that Cotti Coffee (Tianjin) Co., Ltd. was registered in May 2022 with a registered capital of USD 100 million. Its business scope covers catering services, food sales, and online food sales, among others, and it is wholly owned by MAIN MARVEL LIMITED. Notably, in addition to serving as legal representative, Qian Zhiya also holds the positions of executive director and manager of the company.
Qian Zhiya was born in 1976. After graduating from Wuhan Textile University in 1998, she went on to earn an EMBA degree from Peking University. Her professional career includes serving as director, vice president and operations director of UCAR Inc., executive vice president of CAR Inc., and CEO of Luckin Coffee.
To the outside world, Lu Zhengyao and Qian Zhiya have always maintained a mentor-apprentice-like relationship. In 2004, shortly after Qian Zhiya arrived in Beijing from Wuhan, she met Lu Zhengyao and subsequently followed him in entrepreneurship, starting from the most basic chores. Later, when CAR Inc. was founded, Lu Zhengyao recognized Qian Zhiya's business capabilities and promoted her to executive vice president and operations director of CAR Inc.
Qian Zhiya's career can be described as advancing rapidly all the way. At the time, she oversaw CAR Inc.'s more than 1,000 stores nationwide, 100,000 operating vehicles, and 40,000 employees. All of the company's strategic planning and partnership affairs were handled by her alone.
In November 2017, Qian Zhiya formally submitted her resignation to her former employer for personal reasons. She was 41 that year, a stage when her career should have been thriving, but she bid farewell to CAR Inc., where she had worked for 13 years, and chose to enter the coffee industry from scratch, subsequently founding Luckin Coffee. In fact, one month before Qian Zhiya formally resigned, Luckin's first store had already opened at Galaxy SOHO.
In Luckin's early days, half of its funding came from UCAR Inc.'s support. At the time, the company lacked both capital and customers, so Lu Zhengyao set aside an area at UCAR Inc.'s headquarters and leased it to Luckin Coffee as office space. From these actions by Lu Zhengyao, it is not hard to see that he gave tremendous support and help to Qian Zhiya's entrepreneurial decision. After Luckin was founded, Lu Zhengyao not only served as chairman but was also the company's largest angel investor, with the two holding roughly equal stakes.
On May 17, 2019, Luckin Coffee successfully listed on the Nasdaq in the United States. From founding to listing, Luckin took only one year, whereas other companies often need more than twenty years—a speed that set a global market listing record. In the brief 18 months before the listing, Luckin completed four rounds of financing, the first three of which were led and organized by acquaintances such as Li Hui and Liu Erhai. According to media reports, Qian Zhiya once publicly stated that Luckin did not lack money.
However, by April 2020, Luckin Coffee "self-exposed" financial fraud. Just two months before the "self-exposure," short-selling firm Muddy Waters publicly released an anonymous short-selling report accusing Luckin Coffee of suspected financial fraud, alleging that its store sales, product prices, advertising expenses, and net revenue from other products were all exaggerated, and that store operating profit in the third quarter of 2019 was inflated by RMB 397 million. After that, Luckin's stock price fell in response, it came under regulatory investigation, and investor class-action claims followed one after another.
In addition, Luckin was also required to delist from Nasdaq, and trading would remain suspended until it fully met Nasdaq's requirements for supplemental information. Facing this turmoil, Qian Zhiya never spoke publicly. Perhaps she also realized her own mistakes, and ultimately resigned from Luckin in June 2020.
As co-founder, Lu Zhengyao, after being "pushed out" of Luckin Coffee due to his involvement in financial fraud, never stopped his entrepreneurial pace. His earliest attempt was a shared-space project, followed by Qu Xiaomian, Shejian Yingxiong, and now Cotti Coffee. After two years, this "mentor and apprentice" pair has come together again, "joining hands to charge back" into the coffee track. But in the face of an increasingly white-hot competitive environment, whether Cotti Coffee can replicate Luckin's success back then still needs time to answer.
Image source: Internet
The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.
