Canada's Couche-Tard looks to take over 7-Eleven owner
Alimentation Couche-Tard made a proposal to take over much larger rival and 7-Eleven owner Seven & i Holdings Co, in what would be the biggest foreign takeover of a Japanese company. A merger would create the world's top operator of roughly 100,000 convenience stores.
Valued at the equivalent of $31 billion before news of the offer emerged, Seven & i shares jumped 23% on Monday. The company said the bid was preliminary and non-binding, without disclosing terms.
A special committee of independent outside directors will make a «prompt, careful and comprehensive review of the proposal,» Seven & i said in a statement Monday. Couche-Tard confirmed it made a «friendly, non-binding proposal» but gave no details, and said it's not certain an agreement will be reached.
Although Couche-Tard is smaller than Seven & i, with about 14,000 stores compared with more than 85,000 for the Japanese retailer, the Canadian company enjoys a bigger valuation of about $58.5 billion. Foreign takeovers of Japanese companies are extremely rare, but recent changes in guidelines for merger and acquisition proposals, and activist investors pushing companies to boost value — including at Seven & i — could boost the odds of a deal that would create a global convenience-store behemoth.
«It all depends on the price, and I guess the weak yen has made it more attractive and anything north of 7 trillion yen, the management would have a tough time rejecting,» said Amir Anvarzadeh, a strategist at Asymmetric Advisors Pte. «But knowing the Seven & i
