Shares in Seven & i Holdings, parent of convenience stores 7-Eleven, rose on rumors of new takeover offer by Canada’s largest convenience store giant Alimentation Couche-Tard or ACT. The new offer values the Japanese company at more than $47 billion or 20% higher than the earlier $38 billion offer by ACT dismissed last September.
The group’s first offer was turned down by Seven & i Holdings last year, saying the price was too low and that regulatory hurdles existed.
A late September submission of this new bid pushed the shares of Seven & i up by almost 9.5% at the outset, settling at a 5% gain in Tokyo trading. Still, since the latest bid was made, no formal discussions have been held between the two companies. Seven & i also happens to be on a list of businesses deemed critical to national security in Japan, which may well make things more complicated by requiring the government review of foreign investments .
Yahoo Finance, If successful, it would constitute the biggest-ever overseas acquisition of a Japanese company and significantly increase Couche-Tard’s presence in North America in particular – where it would be more than doubling its footprint to 20,000 stores.
