Sawt Falasteen - Couche-Tard executives in Japan to push 7-Eleven deal

Seven & i Holdings last month rejected a US$40-billion takeover bid -- representing the biggest foreign takeover of a Japanese firm -- but the Canadian side has since sweetened the offer by around 20 percent.

"We have invited (Seven & i management), we have tried to organise a meeting, but it didn't work, but it will eventually," ACT chairman and founder Alain Bouchard told Bloomberg News in Japan.

"We also want to gain a better understanding of the Japanese culture, but mainly now the Japanese concerns" around the deal, he said in the interview.

"We want to obviously introduce ourselves because people don't know us."

Bouchard also told the Nikkei daily that they had asked to meet Seven & i president Ryuichi Isaka and his team but that the request "was declined".

The Financial Times quoted a source close to Seven & i saying that while a meeting had yet to be agreed, the two groups had been discussing the terms under which one might take place.

A cherished one-stop shop for everything from rice balls to concert tickets to photocopies, 7-Eleven "konbini" are a ubiquitous sight in Japan.

It is the world's biggest convenience store chain with more than 85,000 outlets worldwide, a quarter of them in Japan.

But Bouchard, 75, said that Japan had nothing to fear.

"We don't change the model. We adapt. We take the best practices from the stores we acquire, or we combine, and we take our best practices together," Bouchard told Bloomberg.

"We'll keep the people that run this company here, and they will hopefully share our culture, and we will share their culture, and we will be just strong," he said.

He added that no Canadian executive would be parachuted into Japan to take over the local operations.

ACT chief executive Alex Miller also told the Nikkei that the firm wanted to buy the whole of Seven & i after the Japanese firm last week said it was carving off its non-core operations into a separate entity.

"We don't want to buy a part of the company," Miller said.

And Brian Hannasch, former CEO and now special adviser, told the FT: "Our offer is a certainty, right, it's cash, versus a hope that (Seven & i) can continue to execute on a plan that's not delivered value over the last years"

Seven & i minority shareholder Artisan Partners this week urged the firm to accept ACT's offer, which the Japanese company said it is studying.

P.Tamimi--SF-PST