Seesaw becomes a high-profile casualty of China’s coffee shop price war

An early pioneer of specialty coffee in China, Shanghai-based Seesaw has been caught off balance by the rapid rise of low-cost coffee chains

Cast your mind back to 2012 and China’s branded coffee shop market was not the behemoth that it is today. There was no Luckin Coffee, no Cotti Coffee and no Lucky Cup; Starbucks led the market with 700 stores and Costa Coffee and McCafé were just starting to scale across the country’s largest cities.

There was also Seesaw Coffee, a Shanghai-based start-up seeking to usher in a new era for China’s nascent specialty coffee industry.

With a focus on boutique outlets and single origin coffee from Yunnan, Seesaw quickly made a name for itself over the next decade, securing hundreds of millions of yuan in investment, opening more than 130 stores and attaining a RMB 1bn ($147.5m) valuation.