Canada’s convenience store giant backed away from a blockbuster bid set to dramatically expanded its convenience store empire, when it pulled its proposal to buy the parent company of rival 7-Eleven on Wednesday.
Canada’s convenience store giant backed away from a blockbuster bid set to dramatically expanded its convenience store empire, when it pulled its proposal to buy the parent company of rival 7-Eleven on Wednesday.
Alimentation Couche-Tard has spent nearly a year courting Seven & i Holdings Co., the Japanese conglomerate with thousands of 7-Eleven locations and a broader portfolio of supermarkets, food producers, and financial services companies.
Couche-Tard, which is based in Laval, Que., and owns Circle K and Ingo, ended its overtures Wednesday, accusing its takeover target of a “persistent lack of good faith engagement.”
Couche-Tard said it repeatedly sought a friendly dialogue with Seven & i’s founding Ito family but alleges it was not open to any conversation.
The Canadian company further charged that in meetings that were “tightly scripted” and ran for half the allotted time management also wasn’t willing to address basic questions about industry dynamics.
“There has been no sincere or constructive engagement from 7&i that would facilitate the advancement of any proposal, contrary to comments made publicly by 7&i representatives, including in the July 11, 2025 earnings call in which 7&i noted it is ‘seriously’ considering our proposal,” Couche-Tard executives said in a letter sent to Seven & i’s board and released to media.
Seven & i did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Had the deal progressed, it would have handed Couche-Tard a dominant position in the global convenience store game.
Its network already covers 29 countries and more than 17,000 stores. By comparison, Seven & i’s website operates about 85,800 stores, has about 157,177 employees and counts 63.6 million customer visits per day.
When a deal between the two was first bandied around last year, Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData said 7-Eleven’s 14.5 per cent market share made it the biggest operator in the convenience retail store space, while Couche-Tard’s banners hold about 4.6 per cent.
“Combining the two would produce an entity that controls almost a fifth of the market,” he wrote in an email at the time.
Couche-Tard first made a friendly offer for Seven & i last August. It improved the bid that fall before issuing a non-binding proposal earlier this year.
Seven & i initially rebuffed the takeover, saying it would be too hard to nab regulatory approvals because some would see the deal as reducing competition across several markets.
But after Seven & i’s founding family failed to secure financing for what could have been a competing bid, Couche-Tard and the Japanese firm entered more serious discussions earlier this year about a potential path forward.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 16, 2025.
Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press