TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan’s Seven & i Group, the owner of 7-Eleven convenience stores, said on Monday it had received a preliminary takeover offer from Canadian company Alimentation Couche-Tard, in what could be the largest acquisition of a Japanese company by a foreign firm.

On the Tokyo Stock Exchange, Seven & i shares soared nearly 23 percent on the news, bringing its valuation to about 5.6 trillion yen ($38 billion), even though the outcome of the tender offer is still far from certain.

The proposal involves buying the entire company, according to two people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to speak to the media and declined to be identified.

Seven & i said it had formed a special committee to review the proposal, but added that no decision had been made by that committee or the board.

The announcement came following a report on the transaction by the Nikkei newspaper.

Alimentation Couche-Tard was slow to respond to a request for comment outside of its usual business hours.

A deal for the entire company would be the largest takeover of a Japanese company by a foreign firm, according to LSEG data, after the 2018 deal for Toshiba’s memory chip business by a consortium led by private equity firm Bain.

The deal, if completed, would follow Couche-Tard’s $3.3 billion (€2.99 billion) purchase of some European gas stations from TotalEnergies last year.

The Canadian group had previously launched a $20 billion offer for Carrefour, but this was rejected in 2021 by the French government on food safety grounds.

(Reporting by Rocky Swift, Anton Bridge, Makiko Yamazaki and Kane Wu; with contributions by Scott Murdoch and Miyoung Kim; Mara Vîlcu; editing by Augustin Turpin)

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