TOKYO - The founding family of Seven & i Holdings is asking Thailand’s Charoen Pokphand Group to invest in a management buyout of the Japanese retailing giant, the Japanese broadcaster NHK reported on Thursday.
The Seven & i subsidiary Seven-Eleven Japan owns 100% of 7-Eleven Inc, which has about 85,000 stores worldwide. CP is the major shareholder of SET-listed CP All Plc, which has about 15,000 7-Eleven branches in Thailand.
The Japanese family is in talks to take the 7-Eleven operator private through a management buyout to fend off a $47-billion takeover from Alimentation Couche-Tard, a Canadian convenience store chain.
CP is the latest candidate approached by the family to support its takeover effort, which values the sprawling convenience store conglomerate at $58 billion and would be the largest management buyout in Japanese history should it go ahead.
The investment by CP would be in the order of hundreds of billions of yen, Japan’s national broadcaster said.
Seven & i declined to comment on the report. A representative for CP Group said they do not comment on speculation.
The US investment firm KKR was earlier reported to be considering taking a stake in a proposal by the Seven & i Holdings founding family.
Led by the Ito family and Itochu Corp, the operator of FamilyMart convenience stores in Japan, the management buyout proposal would involve about ¥4 trillion ($26 billion) in equity stakes with the rest to come from bank financing.
The original proposal envisioned a valuation of as high as ¥9 trillion for Seven & i — trumping the offer of ¥7.5 trillion by Couche-Tard — though this may be lowered as the company’s market valuation hovers well below either figures.
