
Japan's seventh-largest convenience store chain, am/pm Japan, has been put up for sale in an auction that could draw bids from larger rivals Lawson and FamilyMart... Investment bank Daiwa Securities SMBC has been chosen as a financial adviser to manage the sale, two sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the information is not public. am/pm Japan has a network of 1,135 stores and is owned by unlisted retailing group Rex Holdings. The Nikkei business daily had reported earlier on Wednesday that Rex planned to sell am/pm because it has been struggling to turn around the chain, and that Lawson and FamilyMart, the industry's second- and third-largest players, would likely bid. Rex Holdings denied the report: "The newspaper report is completely groundless. There is no truth to it," said Takuro Inoue, executive officer at Rex. A FamilyMart spokesman said it has been approached in the past about investing in am/pm. "We have been asked many times if we were interested in am/pm. We have an interest in them in the sense that they are a rival convenience store but we are now at the stage at which we are monitoring the situation," he said. A spokesman for Lawson said nothing had been decided.
Related FG threads: AM/PM Convenience Store Moves from Oil to Fat and Next Generation Convenience Stores