ALBIS Co., Ltd.

Life Corporation announced on September 8 that it will launch a tender offer for Albis, a food supermarket chain based in the Hokuriku region, and make it a consolidated subsidiary. This is Life's first acquisition of a rival supermarket, with the purchase price reaching up to 26.3 billion yen. Life's main trading areas are the Tokyo metropolitan area and the Kinki region, while Albis is based mainly in Toyama Prefecture and the Hokuriku region, and has already expanded into Aichi and Gifu Prefectures, so the two companies' store networks barely overlap. The acquisition would bring Life and Albis's combined sales to roughly 980 billion yen on a simple sum basis, making it a deal that symbolizes the race among food supermarkets to reach the 1 trillion yen mark. Conventional distribution realignment has been based on the dominant strategy of concentrating store openings, but a movement is now beginning to leapfrog trading areas and bring in companies that are strong in those regions.