Family Mart aiming to have more shops open outside Japan by fiscal 2010

February 11, 2009
By Ken Worsley

Currently, only one of Japan’s major retail brands has more locations overseas than at home (and it should be an easy guess, so no answer in this post - let’s see who gets it first in the comments), but that is about to change.

The Nikkei reported today that Family Mart has announced plans to have about 8,300 shops open outside of Japan by the end of fiscal 2009, which would exceed the 7,600 domestic locations. With the domestic consumer market both saturated and shrinking in size, Family Mart is now concentrating on China and South Korea, where there are currently about 4,100 locations.

Family Mart is hardly the first retail firm to announce ambitious overseas expansion plans. On its website, Yoshinoya stated that it aimed to have more shops open in the US than Japan by about 2015. That information has since been pulled down from the firm’s website.

Still, the trend of Japanese service brands moving overseas to find new markets is bound to accelerate over the coming decade, and it seems likely that convenience stores will be right at the front of this trend.

Filed Under Retail