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.
The investment will likely total several hundred billion yen and Sumitomo Mitsui Card, a unit of Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, may also take a stake, Bloomberg said.
Reuters could not immediately verify the report. SoftBank and SMFG declined to comment, while Seven & i did not respond to a request for comment.
Seven & i operates the 7-Eleven convenience store chain in countries worldwide, with Japan and the U.S. its largest markets.
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.
The potential investment comes a year after the end of Seven & i’s 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.
(Reporting by Tokyo bureau; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise and Jan Harvey)
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