Alex Miller, president and CEO of Alimentation Couche-Tard, affirmed the company’s ongoing commitment to acquire Seven & i Holdings Co. Ltd. in the Circle K owner’s earnings call Thursday.
“Over the last several weeks, we have begun those discussions and look forward to continuing to work with the special committee of Seven & i,” Miller said, according to a transcript from financial services site AlphaSense. “We have also outlined what we believe is a clear path to U.S. regulatory approval.”
If the 7-Eleven/Circle K merger were successful, it would likely require store divestitures to be approved by the Federal Trade Commission.
On the call, Miller told investors that Couche-Tard’s acquisition of GetGo Café + Markets is also showing “ongoing progress” and is expected to close “in the coming days.”
Turning to the retailer’s convenience offers, Miller outlined how the company is winning customers by providing “compelling” value on products and services.
“Our meals deal in North America continued to deliver impressive sequential improvement,” Miller said. “At the end of fourth quarter in the United States, we topped over 500,000 meal deals sold each week, up over 35% from third quarter.”
Miller told investors the food team's focus is on execution simplification, margin improvement, spoilage control and SKU rationalization and consistency.
CFO Filipe Da Silva said overall, the company has seen food spoilage decrease by more than 500 basis points during the quarter compared to the previous year.
“The meal program is really working a lot and driving traffic to our stores, so we feel very encouraged by that,” Da Silva said.
During the question-and-answer session of the call, Miller said he is pleased by the growth the company has made around personalization.
“The progress we’ve made around personalization, being able to give customer offers that are relevant for them on their purchases, being able to know that our fuel customers are on the lot and give them an immediate deal to come into the store, which we're now converting at 20%,” he said.
Turning to the tobacco category, Miller said overall nicotine performance in the United States was slightly negative with declines in cigarettes driven by lower demand.
“However, we continue to outperform the market due to our efforts around price optimization, assortment expansion and personalization programs for our age-verified customers,” Miller said.
Other nicotine product sales were up in the U.S. over the quarter, Miller said as the company deployed a series of initiatives across the segment.
- Alimentation Couche-Tard is No. 2 on CSP’s 2025 Top 202 ranking of U.S. c-store chains by store count.
Alimentation Couche-Tard is a global leader in convenience and fuel retail, operating in 29 countries and territories, with more than 16,700 stores, of which almost 13,100 offer road transportation fuel. With its well-known Couche-Tard and Circle K banners, it is one of the largest independent convenience-store operators in the United States and a leader in the convenience-store industry and road transportation fuel retail in Canada, Scandinavia, the Baltics and Ireland. It also has an important presence in Poland and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of People's Republic of China and has expanded to Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. More than 150,000 people are employed throughout its network.
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