From drab to trendy, 7-Eleven strives for relevance

In Thailand, if you want to convey to someone in the countryside something meaningful about the size and importance of a small town, one of the handiest indicators is whether the place has a 7-Eleven or not. If it has one, then it has come of age, outgrowing the scruffy little mom-and-pop stores that still hang on in rural towns. To millions of Thais outside the big cities, 7-Eleven isn’t a convenience store, it’s glam: having one is a symbol of prosperity, and getting one for the first time is a quantum step up in prestige.

The countryside though isn’t where the 7-Eleven story impacts the most. In the cities, 7-Eleven is a retailer that just keeps evolving and adapting to stay up with consumer lifestyle changes: it has become retail’s pocket battleship that challenges convenience store competition and supermarkets alike. The exclusive licensee for 7-Eleven stores in Thailand is CP-All, a subsidiary of Charoen Pokphand Group that also owns the Makro wholesale and Lotus’s retail businesses. It has transformed the 7-Eleven brand from a drab convenience store to one of the most vibrant and admired brands in Thailand.

Apart from being a mini-supermarket that sells across a full range of supermarket categories in a compact space, 7-Eleven is focussing on areas that make it increasingly relevant, with generous aisle space devoted to health and beauty products, on ready-to-eat meals under its Ezygo house brand, and on premium coffee service. These categories have traditionally been the province of full-line supermarkets and cafes, but 7-Eleven’s ubiquity, easy accessibility and rapid service at the registers have given it an advantage over its more cumbersome competitors. In the health & beauty category, its aisles are stacked with row upon row of attractive and convenient sachet-like packages that offer a huge variety at attractive prices that don’t require a large outlay. 

Equally impressive has been its steady upgrading of ready-to-eat foods, which extends to vegan and plant-based meals. If necessary, food can be heated up in-store, which is good for on-the-go customers and also because most Thai households don’t have conventional ovens. The coffee service has been steadily upgraded and now stands shoulder to shoulder in quality with retailers like Amazon Café.

In its middle aisles, 7-Eleven taps into just about every category that a full-line supermarket has, but with fewer brands and smaller-sized packaging. In all, non-food categories account for 25 per cent of store sales.

Only Japan has more 7-Elevens

Parent company CP-All is the sole licensee for 7-Eleven in Thailand, although it doesn’t operate all the stores itself. It has 14,730 stores in total, second only to Japan. The stores are split roughly half and half between company-operated and franchised. Just over 2,000 of them are located among the satellite retail areas of PTT petrol stations, alongside Amazon Café and other popular outlets. 

Competition in 7-Eleven’s line of business doesn’t just come from supermarkets. Convenience stores are ubiquitous and popular, operated, among others, by Berli Jucker’s Big C Mini, Central Retail’s Tops Daily, and Lotus’s Go Fresh. The latter comes under another subsidiary of CP-All but is much more focused than 7-Eleven on fresh food, particularly meat. While both Lotus’s Go Fresh and 7-Eleven have carved out separate niches, Big C is struggling with a lack of differentiation and a large number of scruffy stores that are badly in need of renewal. 

7-Eleven’s growth has been inexorable with a frenetic pace of store openings: 185 of them were opened in the first quarter of this year alone. The annual average expansion clip is over 700 stores and it plans for the same pace of openings this year in Thailand, along with nearly 50 units in neighbouring Laos and Cambodia, countries for which CP-All also has the exclusive 7-Eleven license.

Strong numbers

Corporate results for the first quarter of 2024 were impressive in an environment where the economy is sputtering, consumers are cash-strapped and a lot of retailers are struggling. The convenience store business raked in 105.9 billion baht (US $3.0 billion), an increase of 13.5 per cent on a year ago. Net profit was 6.2 billion baht ($176.6 million), up by 124.1 per cent. Both gross and net profit margins increased sharply, the latter exactly doubling.

Not all of the revenue growth comes from additional stores: same-store sales were up by a hefty 4.9 per cent (following 5.5 per cent growth in 2023), once again reflecting the success of its merchandise strategy with some assistance from the recovery in tourism. 

Drawbacks

Customers do have some gripes. One of them is payments: 7-Eleven doesn’t accept QR-code payments using regular banking apps like almost every other store in Thailand, including mom and pops in the remotest countryside. (CP-All has a major stake in fintech company Ascend Money, which owns True Money wallet, a major e-payment system accepted at 7-Elevens).

Another unrelated issue, not unique to 7-Eleven, is its food delivery business. Like Grab, Lineman and other online delivery services, 7-Eleven also brings goodies to the customer, but its drivers are frequently maniacal, trying to meet tight schedules by riding on footpaths, riding on the wrong side of roads, running red lights and riding while reading and talking on phones, often with head down. In this part of Asia, such craziness is accepted fatalistically, which is partly why someone dies in a motorbike accident an average of once every half hour in Thailand, a rate of extermination that would cause policymakers elsewhere in the world to recoil in horror. The dangers of the delivery business, to the drivers themselves and to those who share the road with them, are one of the unspoken terrors of an industry that too often pretends it has safeguards in place to ensure its drivers obey the rules and prioritise safety.

That said, there is no turning the clock back: food delivery is now deeply embedded in daily life and 7-Eleven will not let its competitors steal a march. Ordering online and picking up in the store is also a growth business and the company says O2O now accounts for 11 per cent of sales.

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