Couche-Tard → Seven & i Holdings
Canada's Alimentation Couche-Tard, owner of Circle K, spent a year trying to buy Seven & i, the Japanese owner of 7-Eleven, raising its cash offer from $14.86 to $18.19 a share, about $47bn, before withdrawing in July 2025 and accusing Seven & i of "a calculated campaign of obfuscation and delay".
Raised from an initial $38.5bn approach and withdrawn in July 2025 after Couche-Tard said the 7-Eleven owner had failed to engage.
- Value
- $47B
- Announced
- August 2024
- Outcome
- Terminated
- Sector
- Consumer
- Deal type
- acquisition
- Acquirer
- Couche-Tard (Canada)
- Target
- Seven & i Holdings (Japan)
Why it mattered
Couche-Tard made its first proposal on 25 July 2024, and the approach became public on 19 August: $14.86 a share, about $39bn. Seven & i's board, working through a special committee chaired by the outside director Stephen Dacus, rejected it as undervaluing the company and raised the risk of a US competition review. Couche-Tard came back with $18.19 a share, about $47.2bn, which Seven & i acknowledged on 9 October.
Seven & i answered with a plan of its own. It announced it would put its supermarkets and other non-core businesses into a separate company, York Holdings, and its founding Ito family explored a buyout worth about $58bn, which collapsed in late February 2025 when the trading house Itochu withdrew its support. In March Dacus was named chief executive, York Holdings was to be sold to Bain Capital and a US listing of the North American 7-Eleven business was promised. Couche-Tard kept pressing: in December 2024 it offered to commit to a specific number of US store sales and a reverse termination fee of about $1.2bn, and in 2025 it restated the offer in yen, at ¥2,600 a share, a 47.6% premium to the undisturbed price. An NDA was signed in April 2025, but Couche-Tard said the diligence it received was negligible, and it walked away on 16 July.
What it left behind
Seven & i went on alone. The sale of York Holdings to Bain, which took 60%, was completed on 1 September 2025. In April 2026 the North American listing was put off to the financial year starting in March 2027 at the earliest, and in August 2026 SoftBank Corp., PayPay and Sumitomo Mitsui Card paid about ¥300bn between them for treasury shares at ¥2,070 each — a fifth below Couche-Tard's yen offer. Couche-Tard turned to Europe, agreeing on 31 July 2026 to bid for Poland's Żabka at an equity value of about $8.6bn, its largest acquisition. An unsolicited bidder that cannot compel a board to engage ends up competing with the target's own restructuring plan — and the target sets the timetable for both.