Couche-Tard ends bid for 7-Eleven parent company over ‘lack of good faith engagement’

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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Seven & i did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Had the deal progressed, it would have handed Couche-Tard a dominant position in the global convenience store game.

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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.

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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.

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“Combining the two would produce an entity that controls almost a fifth of the market,” he wrote in an email at the time.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 16, 2025.

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