Who Owns 7-Eleven, Lawson and FamilyMart in Japan, and Why It Matters

7-Eleven in Japan is not run from America, and it was not sold to a Canadian buyer. Seven-Eleven Japan began as a licensee of the US Southland Corporation in 1973, and since 2005 the Japanese group has owned the American business outright, while the 2024–25 bid by Alimentation Couche-Tard ended with the bidder walking away.

The other two big names have also changed hands. Lawson's shareholders were reduced to KDDI and Mitsubishi Corporation in 2024, and ITOCHU Corporation's own subsidiary list shows it holding 94.7% of FamilyMart as of March 2024. This guide sets out who owns each chain, how many stores each company says it runs, and the few places where the owner actually changes what happens when you pay.

Three chains, three ownership models

The simplest way to picture the big three is by who sits at the top of each group. Seven-Eleven Japan (セブン‐イレブン) is a subsidiary of Seven & i Holdings (セブン＆アイ・ホールディングス), a company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Prime market under code 3382. Its biggest named shareholders, in a table the company published on 31 July 2026, are trust-bank accounts, Ito-Kogyo at 9.34%, and a group of new partners at about 2% each.

Lawson (ローソン) is no longer listed. Its own 3 July 2024 notice explains that shares were consolidated so that only Mitsubishi Corporation (三菱商事) and KDDI would remain, each holding 50% of the voting rights. Mitsubishi Corporation's news release of 19 August 2024 says Lawson became its equity-method affiliate on 15 August 2024, with Mitsubishi and KDDI each holding 50% of the voting rights.

FamilyMart (ファミリーマート) sits inside the ITOCHU Corporation (伊藤忠商事) group. ITOCHU's list of major subsidiaries as of 31 March 2024 shows FamilyMart as a subsidiary with a 94.7% holding. When ITOCHU announced changes in 2021, it described FamilyMart as a chain of about 16,600 stores serving about 15 million customers a day. That 2021 release adds the rest of the picture: an ITOCHU subsidiary transferred 4.04% of FamilyMart to Norinchukin and 0.86% to Zen-Noh.

The table below decodes the names you will see on receipts, ATMs and corporate pages. Prices are only given where a source publishes one.

Seven & i after the Couche-Tard bid

The takeover story began in August 2024. In a letter published on 6 September 2024, the Seven & i board described a "confidential, non-binding and preliminary proposal to acquire all outstanding shares of 7&i for US$14.86 per share in cash" from Alimentation Couche-Tard, and said the offer "grossly" undervalued the company and ignored US competition-law hurdles.

The bid ended without a deal. On 17 July 2025 Seven & i said: "7&i confirms that ACT has unilaterally decided to end discussions and withdraw its proposal to acquire the Company." In the same statement the company said it would return about ¥2 trillion to shareholders through share buybacks by the end of fiscal 2030, funded partly by selling its supermarket arm and floating its North American business.

That supermarket sale has since happened. A Seven & i notice dated 1 September 2025 says the superstore group, including Ito-Yokado, York-Benimaru, LOFT and Akachan Honpo, was transferred to a company set up by Bain Capital, and that Seven & i reinvested to hold 35.07% of it. Earlier, on 24 June 2025, Seven Bank stopped being a consolidated subsidiary and became an equity-method affiliate.

The price of the superstore sale was set out in the 6 March 2025 plan at ¥814.7 billion. By its FY2025 results presentation of 9 April 2026, Seven & i said ¥0.6 trillion of the ¥2.0 trillion buyback had been completed in FY2025 and that the FY2030 target was unchanged.

The North American listing has slipped. On 6 March 2025 Seven & i said it would "Pursue IPO of 7-Eleven, Inc. (SEI, 7-Eleven in North America) by 2H 2026", but its FY2025 results presentation of 9 April 2026 states "SEI IPO timing revised to FY2027 at the earliest." If you read an older article that says the US spin-off happened in 2026, the company's own documents do not support it.

The newest change is a Japanese one. On 31 July 2026 Seven & i announced a capital and business alliance with SoftBank, PayPay and Sumitomo Mitsui Card, each receiving just over 48.3 million treasury shares, or about 2.13% after the disposal. The plan lists "Integration of 7iD into PayPay ID" and "Introduction of PayPay Point and V Point across 7-Eleven stores and services" among its key initiatives.

Other listed initiatives include deploying 7-Eleven mini-apps on the PayPay and LINE platforms and running campaigns aimed at SoftBank subscribers and PayPay and LINE Yahoo users. After the disposal, the largest holder in Seven & i's own shareholder table is the Master Trust Bank of Japan's trust account at 17.42%.

Seven & i is still looking abroad as well. On 25 July 2026 it said talks about investing in "Poland's largest convenience store chain" had ended without agreement, while adding that Europe "remains an attractive growth opportunity". Back home, the group reported same-store sales growth of 2.0% at Seven-Eleven Japan for the quarter to 31 May 2026, with total store sales of ¥1.37 trillion and a merchandise gross profit margin of 32.0%.

Lawson under KDDI and Mitsubishi

Lawson's change of ownership was a planned two-step deal rather than a hostile bid. Lawson's board announced on 6 February 2024 that it supported a tender offer by KDDI at ¥10,360 per share, and KDDI's newsroom said at the time that after the transaction Mitsubishi Corporation and KDDI would each hold 50% of Lawson's voting rights.

The squeeze-out followed in the summer. Lawson's 3 July 2024 notice says an extraordinary shareholders' meeting approved consolidating 50,038,357 shares into one, so that holders other than Mitsubishi Corporation would be left with fractions that would be sold to KDDI. Mitsubishi Corporation's release says Lawson became its equity-method affiliate on 15 August 2024, with each partner holding 50%.

Lawson's roots are in Osaka rather than Tokyo. The company's history page says the first Japanese store, Sakurazuka (桜塚店), opened on 14 June 1975 in Toyonaka, Osaka, when the supermarket group Daiei was Lawson's parent. The company profile gives a founding date of 15 April 1975, consolidated total store sales of ¥3.0223 trillion and 12,087 consolidated employees, with a head office in Osaki, Shinagawa, Tokyo, and stores in all 47 prefectures.

The Lawson group counted 14,697 stores in Japan at the end of February 2026, including stores run by Lawson Store 100 and regional companies in Kochi, southern Kyushu and Okinawa. Tokyo accounted for 1,639 of them and Osaka for 1,200. Abroad the count was 7,793, of which 6,977 were in China, with the rest in Indonesia (351), the Philippines (236), Thailand (227) and the US state of Hawaii (2).

Head-office decisions reach the shop floor in visible ways. On 28 April 2020 Lawson announced that, as head office, it had decided to pause the use of toilets, rubbish bins and ashtrays in its stores to limit the spread of COVID-19, citing used chopsticks, containers, masks and tissues collected in the bins. Our separate guide on why Tokyo has few bins sets out what stores and local governments say now.

KDDI's joint release with Mitsubishi and Lawson frames the deal as combining Lawson's stores, which it put at about 14,600 with about 10 million customers a day, with KDDI's digital contact with about 31 million customers. That is the companies' stated aim; no source read here measures what the partnership has changed.

FamilyMart inside the ITOCHU group

FamilyMart began as a store before it was a company. The chain's history page says the first FamilyMart opened in September 1973 in Sayama, Saitama Prefecture, the first franchise store followed in 1978 in Funabashi, Chiba, and FamilyMart Co., Ltd. was established in September 1981.

The same page says the chain reached all 47 prefectures in 2006 and launched the FamiPay payment service in 2019. The same history lists a 2010 merger with am/pm Japan, a 2015 merger with Cocostore, and the completion of the brand integration with Circle K Sunkus in 2018. The am/pm, Cocostore, Circle K and Sunkus names now appear in that history rather than in the company's current store count.

On the company's store page, FamilyMart counted 16,455 stores in Japan and 9,191 overseas on 31 August 2026, for a total of 25,646. Tokyo had 2,443 and Osaka 1,363. Four companies run the Japanese stores: FamilyMart Co., Ltd. itself (15,529), Minami Kyushu FamilyMart (384), Okinawa FamilyMart (338) and JR Kyushu Retail (204).

FamilyMart's own pages do not always agree on the headline number. The Japanese company outline gives 25,263 stores at the end of February 2026, including domestic and overseas area franchises, while the English outline still shows 24,620 at the end of February 2025. Use the dated store page if you need a current figure, and quote the date with it.

ITOCHU's stake is the part that is hardest to pin to today. The most recent ITOCHU subsidiary list read for this guide is dated 31 March 2024 and shows 94.7%. The 2021 transfers to Norinchukin and Zen-Noh total 4.9%, but no source read here restates the shareholding split after March 2024.

Counting the stores honestly

The Japan Franchise Association does not publish a per-chain league table. Its July 2026 monthly report, released on 20 August 2026, counts 56,162 stores across seven member head offices: Seicomart, Seven-Eleven Japan, FamilyMart, Poplar, Ministop, Yamazaki Baking's Daily Yamazaki division and Lawson. That total was 0.5% higher than a year earlier. The association says it normally publishes each month's figures around the 20th of the following month, and its July report named 24 September 2026 as the date of the next release.

The same report shows customers spending more per visit and visiting a little less often. Average spend per customer across all member stores was ¥749.1 in July 2026, up 2.2% on the year, while the number of customer visits fell 1.1%. The association attributes the rise in sales to promotions and coupons that lifted fried foods, desserts, snacks, household goods and toys.

For individual chains you have to go to each company, and each company counts on a different day. The comparison below puts the latest published figures side by side, with the date each one refers to.

The association's report also shows what the combined stores sell. Measured by existing-store sales in July 2026, daily fresh foods such as rice balls, bread and counter snacks made up 35.4%, processed foods such as drinks, alcohol and sweets 28.5%, non-food items including tobacco, magazines and cosmetics 31.3%, and services such as tickets and prepaid cards 4.8%.

Two cautions apply before you add these up. The dates differ by six months, and the Lawson figure includes Natural Lawson and Lawson Store 100, while the FamilyMart figure includes regional franchisees. Adding the three Japan figures gives 53,109, below the association's 56,162; the association's total also includes Seicomart, Ministop, Poplar and Daily Yamazaki.

Seven & i's own wording is looser than the map it publishes. The July 2026 alliance notice speaks of "more than 20,000 locations" and "approximately 20 million daily customer touchpoints", while Seven-Eleven Japan's prefecture map gives the exact 21,957. When you see a round number, check whether it is a precise count or a marketing figure.

If your shopping list leans towards household goods rather than snacks, the konbini chains are not the only national networks to compare; our guide to Tokyo's 100-yen shop chains covers four of them.

What changes for you at the counter

A few services follow the ownership lines, and the clearest is cash. Seven Bank's English page asks "Do you think that Japanese ATMs and cash dispensers do not accept your cash card, credit card, or debit card?" and answers that "at over 28,000 ATMs at 7-Eleven stores all across Japan, you can withdraw Japanese Yen day or night."

The same page adds a caveat worth taking seriously: "Some cards with these marks may not be accepted." Seven Bank has been an equity-method affiliate of Seven & i since June 2025 rather than a consolidated subsidiary, but its ATMs are still the ones inside 7-Eleven stores. The ATM count and the store count measure different things, so do not treat 28,000 as a store total. Seven-Eleven Japan's own history records that ATMs of IY Bank, Seven Bank's former name, were installed in 9,652 stores by February 2005.

Points and payment apps are the second difference. FamilyMart's FamiPay page says you can link a point card of your choice and earn one point per ¥200 spent, tax included. Lawson's payment page lists Ponta and d POINT cards among its point cards, and Seven & i has announced that PayPay Point and V Point are to be introduced across 7-Eleven stores, without a start date in the notice.

The loyalty schemes are built around apps and point cards, and none of the pages read here explains how a short-stay visitor would sign up, so treat them as optional.

What this guide does not cover

ATM fees, withdrawal limits and the list of accepted card networks are left out here, because the Seven Bank page read for it does not state fees and Lawson Bank's English ATM page returned an access error, so foreign-card acceptance at Lawson and FamilyMart ATMs could not be verified.

It does not give ITOCHU's current percentage of FamilyMart after 31 March 2024, the exact date Lawson's shares stopped trading, or a start date for PayPay Point and V Point at 7-Eleven, because none of the official pages read gives them. It also does not cover smaller chains such as Ministop, Seicomart, Poplar and Daily Yamazaki beyond their inclusion in the association's total.

Finally, it does not predict whether Couche-Tard or anyone else will bid again, or when 7-Eleven, Inc. will list in the United States. The last official word read here is "FY2027 at the earliest", dated 9 April 2026, and store counts change monthly, so check the companies' pages before quoting a number.