The Japanese group’s founder died last year at the age of 98 with a net worth of $US5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His son Junro Ito is an executive vice president and sits on the board.

Bouchard and Couche-Tard co-founder Jacques D’Amours also built 10-figure fortunes from the convenience store business, with net worths of $US7.9 billion and $US3.9 billion respectively, according to Bloomberg’s wealth index. The company has grown from a single suburban Montreal location opened by Bouchard in 1980 to more than 16,700 stores globally via a deal spree that’s seen it snap up rivals including US chain Circle K.

Activist pressure

The late Ito, who was born in 1924, expanded his small family-owned shop into one of Japan’s largest retailers and took 7-Eleven convenience stores global.

Sometimes called the Sam Walton of Japan, Ito was known for a decentralised business style that was influenced by his long friendship with famed management consultant Peter Drucker, who once described Ito as “one of the world’s outstanding entrepreneurs and business builders.”

The company’s empire now spans 85,000 convenience stores, petrol stations and retail outlets worldwide.

It also plays an outsized role in Japan, offering essential services including food and water delivery in times of calamities such as earthquakes, Causton said.

“Seven & i is more than just a retailer; it is part of the backbone of Japanese emergency response services,” he said. “So I don’t see government being supportive of a foreign takeover in this case.”

Until recently, the firm was forging takeovers of its own. In 2020, Seven & i agreed to buy about 3900 Speedway petrol stations and stores from US-based Marathon Petroleum Corp. for $US21 billion, at the time its biggest-ever deal.

Seven & i has come under pressure from activist fund ValueAct Capital Management LP over perceptions that its assets could be worth more and to narrow its focus to 7-Eleven stores.

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“The company might work even harder to improve the businesses to prove that it is the best owner,” following soft sales lately, Macquarie analysts Natsuko Douglas and Linda Huang wrote in a note. “Management appears to be making efforts to improve these numbers.”

Foreign takeovers of Japanese companies are extremely rare, but recent changes in guidelines for mergers, as well as activist investors pushing companies to boost value, could open the door to a deal that would create a global convenience-store behemoth.

Heirs of Masatoshi Ito own the majority of their Seven & i shares through an investment vehicle that doesn’t disclose individual ownership. Ito and his wife, Nobuko, had three children — Yasuhisa, Hisako and Junro.

Bloomberg

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