The Japanese owner of the 7-Eleven convenience store chain yesterday announced plans to focus on its core business, in a move seen as fending off a takeover bid by Canada’s Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc (ACT).
Creating the new unit would allow Seven & i Holdings Co to rejuvenate 7-Eleven, the world’s biggest convenience store chain with more than 85,000 outlets worldwide, one-quarter of them in Japan.
Seven & i rejected a takeover offer worth US$40 billion last month from ACT, which owns the Circle K chain.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The firm “resolved at the management meeting held today to establish an intermediate holding company ... that will preside over the company’s supermarket food business, specialty store and other businesses,” a statement said yesterday.
The firm said it would consider an initial public offering of the new unit and bringing in strategic partners “to unlock value for the company’s shareholders and other stakeholders.”
Seven & i had said that the ACT proposal, which would be the biggest foreign takeover of a Japanese firm, “grossly” undervalued its business and could face regulatory hurdles.
The firm on Wednesday said that it had received a revised offer, but declined to give details. Bloomberg News and other media outlets reported that ACT had sweetened its offer by about 20 percent to about ￥7 trillion yen (US$47 billion).
ACT declined to comment.
The new holding company would include 31 businesses, such as supermarket chains Ito-Yokado, York-Benimaru and baby goods shop Akachan Honpo.
Seven & i also said it plans to change its name, tentatively to 7-Eleven Corp, which would be finalized at a shareholders’ meeting.
ACT, which began with one store in the city of Laval in 1980, now runs nearly 17,000 convenience stores worldwide.
In 2021, ACT dropped a takeover bid worth 16 billion euros (US$17.5 billion at the current exchange rate) for French supermarket Carrefour SA after the French government said it would veto the deal over food security concerns.
It is unclear if the new government under Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba would do the same, but the Japanese Ministry of Finance designated Seven & i a “core” industry last month.
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