Owner of 7-Eleven stores receives buyout offer from Canadian rival

The owner of the global convenience store chain 7-Eleven has received an offer from a Canadian rival to buy the company, in what could be Japan’s biggest ever foreign takeover.

The Tokyo-based Seven & i revealed on Monday that it had received a bid from the Canadian convenience store multinational Alimentation Couche-Tard (ACT) to buy its stake in the company.

7-Eleven has grown into one of the world’s largest convenience store businesses, with more than 84,000 stores across 19 countries, including 13,000 in the US and 22,000 in Japan.

The Montreal-based ACT is listed on the Toronto stock exchange and has more than 16,700 stores and petrol stations across 31 countries.

Seven & i confirmed it had received a preliminary proposal from ACT to acquire all of its outstanding shares and had now set up a special committee to review the proposal and make a recommendation to the board. Shares at Seven & i rose by 22% on Monday off the back of the news of the potential takeover, lifting the company’s valuation to 5.6tn yen (£29.6bn).

The Nikkei, which first reported the story, said the deal would potentially be the biggest foreign takeover of a Japanese company.

It will also be one of the first takeover attempts after the Japanese government softened rules last year, making it harder for boards to ignore unsolicited offers. Previous rules made it easier for chief executives and directors to block bids against the interest of shareholders.

7-Eleven can trace its routes back to 1920s Texas. It picked up its name in 1946, because of its opening hours of 7am to 11pm. Since then, it has expanded throughout the US and become synonymous with products such as the Slurpee and 32-ounce Big Gulp drinks. In 2005, it was bought fully by the major stakeholder Ito-Yokado through Seven & i and continued to expand in the US.

ACT began with its convenience store brand in the province of Quebec more than 40 years ago and now has 652 convenience stores and petrol stations across Canada. In 2003, it bought the US convenience store Circle K, which is now present in more than 24 countries worldwide.

It has recently been trying to boost its global presence with acquisitions and unsuccessfully tried to buy the French supermarket chain Carrefour in 2021 for €16.2bn (£13.7bn). It also bid for the US petrol station chain Speedway but was beaten to the acquisition by Seven & i.

Seven & I’s committee looking into the takeover will be led by the chair, Stephen Hayes Dacus, and it has promised to carry out a prompt review. It stressed that it had made no decision on whether to accept or reject the proposal.