Despite rising real estate costs, evolving consumer needs and fast-changing digital trends, the convenience store business seem to be on an upswing.
Philippine Seven Corp., the master-franchisee for the 7-Eleven convenience store in the Philippines, is in the forefront of this trend as it has put up 250 of a planned 500-store rollout for the year on a year to date basis. The company is now securing the completion of the remaining half up until the end of the year.
Francis Medina, Philippine Seven operations director, said of these, “close to 70 percent will be in Visayas and Mindanao.”
“This is mainly due to the to the growth that we’ve seen in the past two or three years, surpassing Luzon, even in NCR stores,” Medina, speaking at the the Philippine Stock Exchange’s (PSE) Strengthening Access and Reach (STAR) forum yesterday.
Medina said that the stores are already in various stages of construction.
Lawrence de Leon, Philippine Seven head of finance, said the company is on track to have 5,000 stores by the end of next year.
The company closed the first half of the year with a store network of 4,268 stores.
“In the first six months alone, we opened 177 new stores and closed 39 underperforming stores,” de Leon said.
“Our pipeline remains to be very strong,” he declared.
Philippine Seven closed the first half of the year with a reported net income of P1.78 billion, up 0.7 percent from P1.76 billion last year. Revenues grew 7.5 percent at P46.54 billion from P43.31 billion last year.
De Leon said system-wide sales grew 5.6 percent, at P48.46 billion from P45.9 billion.
Service upgrade continues, with the company set to migrate to a new payment switch by the fourth quarter of the year to increase uptime, reliability, and expand services like bills payment and e-loads, said de Leon.
