A dot-com deja vu in China: Welcome to the land of 'unicorns', cheap meals

The rewards are rich, as are valuations. And the risks are rising. How it will play out depends upon whom you ask

We’ve seen it before: the crazy spending, the stratospheric valuations. Twenty years later, it looks like the dot-com boom all over again, but this time the players are much bigger—and Chinese.

A Beijing-based startup that lets consumers order coffee via smartphones raced into so-called unicorn territory—a $1 billion valuation—in seven months from launch. The value of another firm, billed as an “Uber for trucks,” has soared to 300 times 2017 revenue; Uber Technologies Inc. itself is worth only about 10 times revenue.

But where some investors see dynamic exuberance, others see a market increasingly threatened by a confluence of forces including onerous