TOKYO, July 10 (Reuters) – SoftBank Corp and mobile payments operator PayPay are in talks to invest in retail giant Seven & i Holdings, Bloomberg News reported on Friday.
Bloomberg said the investment will likely total several hundred billion yen and Sumitomo Mitsui Card may also take a stake, while the Nikkei business daily reported later that total investment is expected to reach up to 300 billion yen ($1.85 billion).
Sumitomo Mitsui Card is a unit of Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group.
Reuters could not immediately verify the reports. SoftBank, Seven & i, PayPay and SMFG declined to comment.
Seven & i operates 7-Eleven stores worldwide, with Japan and the U.S. its largest markets.
If the investment comes to fruition, it would be a welcome boost for embattled Seven & i, which has failed to turn around its flagging business a year after its prolonged tussle with Canadian convenience store rival Alimentation Couche-Tard, which had sought to take it over in what would have been Japan’s largest-ever foreign buyout.
Seven & i has been under pressure from investors for years about its lacklustre returns and faced calls for it to focus on its core convenience store business.
In March 2025 it agreed to sell off its supermarkets business, comprising stores that are much bigger than convenience stores and which operated under separate brand names, to private equity firm Bain Capital.
SoftBank is aiming to use its in-house artificial intelligence to improve store management and look to introduce autonomous robots to reduce manpower in Seven & i stores, Bloomberg said.
SoftBank Corp, the domestic telecommunications arm of SoftBank Group, has been developing AI tools for enterprise clients with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.
OpenAI has been the focus of a giant investment push, with SoftBank Group’s cumulative commitment investment set to exceed $60 billion by the end of 2026.
($1 = 161.7500 yen)
(Reporting by Tokyo bureau; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise, Jan Harvey and Susan Fenton)
Comments